Scenes from Early Life
Philip Hensher
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, this is the new novel from the author of ‘King of the Badgers’ and the Man Booker-shortlisted ‘The Northern Clemency’.“I was a baby during the war. We stayed inside for months. All my aunts took turns in feeding me. I couldn't be heard to cry. You see, there were soldiers in the streets. They would have known what a crying baby meant. So I had to be kept silent. No, not everyone came out of the war alive.”One family’s life, and a nation – Bangladesh – are uniquely created through conversation, sacrifice, songs, bonds, blood, bravery and jokes. Narrated by a young boy born into a savage civil war, ‘Scenes from Early Life’ is a heartbreaking, funny and gripping novel by one of our finest writers.
Scenes from
Early Life
A novel
Philip Hensher
Dedication
For Richard Heaton
Contents
Cover (#u733760bc-cef8-5024-9018-84c0962f4779)
Title Page (#u259ed8d4-5337-5258-97c3-601513b1a3b0)
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1 - At Nana’s House
Chapter 2 - The Game of Roots
Chapter 3 - Altaf and Amit
Chapter 4 - A Journey in the Dry Season
Chapter 5 - A Party at Sufiya’s
Chapter 6 - How Big-uncle Left Home
Chapter 7 - Nana’s Faith in Rustum
Chapter 8 - How Amit Went to Calcutta
Chapter 9 - How I Was Allowed to Eat As Much As I Liked
Chapter 10 - The Song the Flower Sang
Chapter 11 - Structural Repairs
Chapter 12 - Nadira’s Wedding
Chapter 13 - What Happened to Them All?
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Philip Hensher
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note
This is a novel of the formation of Bangladesh. Until 1971, it formed an eastern province of Pakistan, divided from the western part by geography, language, and culture. It broke from the western side in a savagely violent war of independence. In December 1971, after the deaths of uncounted innocent victims in the civil war, a new country was declared: Bangla Desh, the Home of the Bengalis.
Scenes from Early Life is the story of one upper-middle-class Bengali family, a novel which is told in the form of a memoir. The narrator speaks in the voice of Zaved Mahmood, the author’s husband, who was born in late 1970 shortly before the outbreak of the war of independence.
Chapter 1
At Nana’s House
1.
Even the shit of a dog smells good to you, if it’s English.
(Ingrazi kuttar gu-o tomar khache bhalo.)
My grandmother used to say this to my grandfather. He was very pro-Empire. That was my mother’s father, who used to call me Churchill when I cried. At first I did not know who Churchill was, but my grandfather would explain to me, and after a while I knew who he meant when he said Churchill. He meant me, and often he would ask to have me sit next to him at the lunch table. ‘I want Churchill here,’ he said, and I would be led up by my ayah, not crying at all. I felt very proud. The theory was that when Churchill was a little boy, he used to cry very much. All the time. He was a great reader of biographies, my grandfather.
When he went out to a friend’s house, we would drive there in a big red car – a Vauxhall, I think. He was an income-tax lawyer, the president of the East Pakistan Income Tax Lawyers’ association. Later, the Bangla Desh Income Tax Lawyers’ Association. There, at one old man’s house or another, I would be allowed to stay in company for a while. He liked to show me off, and would call me Churchill in front of his friends. I don’t believe that, as he said, he thought I would be the Churchill of Bangla Desh when I grew up. I think he mainly called me that because I cried.
My grandfather’s great friend was called, by us, Mr Khandekar-nana. He had been a friend of my grandfather’s from college, all the way back in the British time. They used to share a room when they were at college, a long time ago in the 1930s, and ever afterwards, they were friends with each other. They had gone on being friends when they moved to Calcutta to be lawyers. (That was where they were in 1947.) And afterwards they had both moved to Dacca. My grandfather was Nana to us and his friend was Mr Khandekar-nana.
They both lived in the Dhanmondi area, very close to each other. It was the best place in Dacca to live. Nana’s house was in road number six; Mr Khandekar-nana’s was in road number forty. Both of them were two-storey houses with glass walls to the porch and flat roofs, both intricate and complex in their ground plan. It was only a ten-minute walk from Nana’s house to Mr Khandekar-nana’s, and it was a pleasant walk. The roads of Dhanmondi were quiet, and lined with trees, all painted white to four feet high, to discourage the ants. ‘Ants can’t walk on white,’ my mother used to say. ‘They are frightened of being seen. So that’s why they paint the tree trunks white.’ I still don’t know how true that is. On the walk from Nana’s house to Khandekar-nana’s house, you would see only the occasional ayah, or mother, walking with her children, only the occasional houseboy loafing outside against the high, whitewashed walls of the houses, in those days. But my grandfather had a big red car, a Vauxhall, I think, and we drove the short distance to Mr Khandekar-nana’s house.
Among the keen interests they shared were plants and flowers, and they kept their gardeners up to the mark. In front of their houses were roses, jasmine, dahlias, even sunflowers – English flowers, often. The two of them took pleasure in choosing flowers together, and their gardens were only different in small details. They were planted neatly, in rows, against the neat white Bauhaus style of their houses, and the mosaic in ash and white and green on the ground. The flowerbeds were in the sunniest part of the garden, away from the tamarind tree at the front of my grandfather’s house, the mango tree at the front of Mr Khandekar-nana’s.
The visits to Mr Khandekar-nana’s followed the same sequence. My grandfather and Mr Khandekar-nana would go up to the balcony, shaded by the mango tree, and I would be allowed to go up with them. The tea would arrive and a plate of biscuits. My grandfather and Mr Khandekar-nana would take one biscuit each – one, one, judiciously, carefully, as lawyers do. Then I would be allowed to eat the rest. My grandfather would boast about how many books I had read, and as Khandekar-nana’s wife arrived, to greet us and bring my grandfather up to date with her grandchildren, he would mention that he thought in the end I would be the Churchill of Bangla Desh.
A great friend of mine was the daughter of another friend of my grandfather, a child specialist who lived quite opposite Nana’s house. She was ten years older than I was. When we visited them, she would take me to her living room and feed me biscuits from her own tin. It had English pictures on top of it, of a house with hair for a roof and a pony eating from a lawn. She had a lot of books and a phonogram; still, it is the biscuits that I remember. I wonder now whether I was notorious in the neighbourhood. But I will explain why I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted when I come to it.
2.
He had a driver, my grandfather, which always very much impressed me. The driver’s name was Rustum. Rustum stayed in the family for fifteen years, living with his family just next to the garage, outside the courtyard of the house. He was always very friendly to us children. I got to know him not because of our Sunday trips to my grandfather’s friends, but because of what happened during the week. My grandmother would often ask Rustum to go to market for her. Rustum, too, liked me, and he would ask me and sometimes my sister to go with him. We always went because he slipped us a lozenge or a jujube at the end of the trip.
It was important that we would slip off with Rustum without mentioning it to anyone – the trip, like the secret jujube, was no fun if the grown-ups knew about it. But when I and my sister Sunchita were missed, my mother would start to shout and panic. My second aunty, Mary-aunty, would start to shout and panic. I know this because when we returned home, they would go on shouting and panicking at us, and at Rustum. ‘Why couldn’t you tell anyone that you were taking the children?’
We were kept under close surveillance, Sunchita and I, because we could never stay still. We were always chasing the chickens, climbing the mango tree in the garden, sneaking off to the market with Rustum, who conspired with us against the grown-ups. In the end, Rustum was sacked by my grandfather and died of tuberculosis.
3.
My grandfather and my grandmother fought a war of attrition over the balcony on the first floor. My grandfather thought it his possession, the place he could retreat to from the noise and crowd elsewhere. He had an image of his balcony as being like Mr Khandekar-nana’s balcony and, I believe, thought of himself sitting on the cool open space, a cup of tea and biscuits to one side while the grandchildren and children, cousins and nephews and visitors from his village on business rampaged through the rest of the house.
There was a wooden armchair on the balcony, an orange-brown plantation chair with extendable limbs on which you could rest your legs. But it was generally pushed to one side, because my grandmother had her own ideas for the balcony. She encouraged the cook to see it as a useful space where things could be stored or placed to dry. Almost always, jolpai and mango were laid out there for drying, covered with dry spice on banana leaves; against the wall, rows of bottled pickles in mustard oil. It drove my grandfather mad with irritation that the balcony was being used in this way. ‘This house is like a pickle factory,’ he would mutter as, once again, he retreated from his balcony and went back downstairs to his library.
My challenge was to get on to the balcony while my grandmother was busy with other things. The tamarind tree was old, and thick-leaved; its boughs thrust beneath the roof and into the balcony’s space. If nobody was about, I climbed the tree and dropped softly on to the balcony. Or sometimes my sister Sunchita and I would conceal ourselves behind a curtain, or underneath a table, waiting for the servants to go by, and then we would run up to my grandfather’s room, and afterwards on to the balcony.
There, we hid. I liked to taste the pickles that had been laid out; I liked the pucker they made on my tongue.
4.
We did not live at my grandfather’s house, but we went there for the weekend, almost every weekend. We especially went there if there was a good movie on television. We knew that there was a movie on television every Sunday afternoon and Saturday evening. It was often a Calcutta movie, an old Satyajit Ray film or something of that sort. Still, my father refused to buy a television for us, and so we went eagerly to Nana’s house.
The television was placed in the dining room, at the end of the polished mahogany table, which could seat, and often did seat, twelve people. Only Grandfather and Grandmother, Nana and Nani, had their own allotted places.
As well as having no television, my parents had, at that time, no car. We would arrive on a rickshaw at lunchtime on Friday – a cycle-rickshaw, with room for four. There was always a fight between me and the younger of my two sisters, Sunchita, over who would get to sit on my mother’s lap. My elder sister was above such things, and my big brother, Zahid, too. He was aloof, and came when he chose.
At lunch on Friday there would be guests from my grandfather’s village, his cousins or sisters, on a journey to Dacca for purposes of their own. The faces came and went. There would be hilsha fish, rice, some of the cook’s pickles, such as a mango pickle from the mango tree at the back of the garden, or jolpai. Jolpai is a small sour berry, about the size of an olive. My grandmother, with her sharp tongue, ruled over the lunch table on Friday. It was a time for children and for the women, of whom there were many in our family.
After lunch, we children went to bed. At night we slept downstairs, but in the afternoon we were put to bed in an aunt’s room, upstairs. It was Mary-aunty’s job to get us to bed, and she shouted at us: ‘Go to bed – take a book.’ But we did not rest. My sister Sunchita and I would spend the time fighting. We always wanted to read the same book, though Sunchita was a better reader than I was. I liked books with pictures in them; Sunchita read a novel by Sharat Chandra Chattapadhaya when she was only eight, a novel for adults. (‘Why are you reading this book? This book is not for you,’ my grandfather said, surprised but not angry.) In the hour of rest, I would demand that Sunchita read her book out to me, or if I was crotchety, that she give it to me. And so we fought.
My grandfather came home from his lawyer’s chambers at five, or half past five. The creak and gong-like echo of the opening gate; then his red car, a Vauxhall, driven by Rustum, with its engine noise unlike any other engine noise; and then my grandfather’s voice downstairs. ‘Is anyone here?’ he said, his voice hardly above conversation pitch. But, of course, there was always somebody there. It was a game between him and me. Of all the people in the house, I called, ‘Nana, I am here.’
Then he would say, ‘Churchill! You are here. When did you arrive?’ That was the signal to get up and go to greet my grandfather.
My grandfather was a very competitive person, and once he had changed out of his Western suit into what he liked to wear in the evening, a white Panjabi and white pyjamas, he might tease my mother with stories of what my father, his son-in-law, had got up to during the day. As my father and my grandfather were both lawyers in the same field of income-tax law, they sometimes found themselves on opposite sides of a case. My grandfather never let this opportunity fall.
‘Mahmood tried to be very intelligent today,’ he would say, waiting for the tea, biscuits and nuts – he was very fond of nuts – to arrive. ‘But it all fell very flat.’
‘Which case was that?’ my mother asked. Before she married, she, too, had started to train as a lawyer; she still helped out with legal research. She liked to talk about the law with my father, and her father, too. My grandfather explained, going into detail. ‘I’m sure he made a very good case,’ my mother said loyally.
‘Mahmood tried to be very intelligent today,’ my grandfather said, laughing, ‘but it didn’t succeed at all.’
5.
These are the names of the aunts who came to dinner at Nana’s house almost every Friday night.
Mira-aunty had moved to Canada, so she did not come.
Nadira-aunty was in England, in Sheffield, with her husband.
And Boro-mama, Big-uncle, the eldest of Nana’s children, had his own house in Dacca and his own family, so he did not come, although he had left one of his sons behind with Nana and Nani, as if absent-mindedly.
Those aunts and that uncle did not come for dinner.
But Nana sat at the head of the table, and to his left sat Nani, my grandmother. She had a highly polished teak stool for her leg to rest on; it had a long hollow on it, which I used to imagine had been worn away by her leg, over hundreds, thousands, of family dinners. But I think it was really made that way. From time to time she would call for a servant to give her a massage in the middle of dinner.
My grandmother loved to talk about food, though for her the best food was always food she had eaten in the past, and not the food she had just eaten. She allowed a certain amount of time to pass – years, usually – before she would award a compliment. The only daughter who loved food as much as she did was Bubbly, and they could keep up conversations about individual long-ago dishes for hours. Bubbly could remember, in quite specific detail, the dishes her sisters had had at their weddings, and she and her mother would happily go over them, or food they had eaten at other times.
‘Do you remember?’ Nani would say, her leg resting on the teak footrest. ‘Do you remember the steamed rui that Sharmin taught Ahmed how to make when everyone was living here? Do you remember, Bubbly? It was so good, that steamed rui with lemon and ginger. And she taught him, and he never got it right afterwards. I don’t know why. But it was never so delicious ever again. He didn’t listen properly, or he made some changes of his own, wretched boy, and completely spoiled the dish. Oh, I loved to eat that steamed rui. I could have eaten it every day.’
‘It was so clever of her,’ Dahlia would say, calling from half a table away. ‘It is so strange that it was her to be so clever with fish, being Bihari, and not liking fish as much as we do.’
‘Well, Dahlia,’ Nani said. ‘She didn’t like fish at the beginning. But she came to like it because your big brother likes it so much. And now she likes it as much as anyone, and she has such clever ways with it.’
‘Because, of course,’ Bubbly said, taking no notice of her mother, ‘there was not always a great choice of things to eat, that year, but you could often get rui when there was no other fish to be had. I wish Sharmin would come back and teach Ahmed how to make it again, but she says she can’t remember, and she says she doesn’t know what’s wrong with the way Ahmed cooks it, so that would really be a fool’s errand.’
Nani and Nana had the best view of the television, which was at the far end of the table, on the sideboard next to a little fridge for all sorts of odds and ends. Dinner took place at eight, because that was when the television news was on.
Next to my grandmother sat Mary-aunty. She was the eldest of the sisters, after my mother. It was her job to keep the children under control, but she could often be tearful when faced with determined opposition, and I wonder if she was very good at her household task.
Next to her sat Shibli, who was Boro-mama’s son. I was very jealous of Shibli. Whereas we only came to visit Nani and Nana at weekends, Shibli lived with them all the time, and visited Boro-mama, his father, only occasionally. This seemed to me the height of glamour, and it made me sick to see the ways in which Shibli was spoilt by my grandparents.
Choto-mama, Little-uncle, came next. His name was Pultoo. He was not much older than the bigger children, and was still at college. He was not a lawyer; he was an artist. In an odd way, my grandfather was rather proud of that: he used to say, ‘If Pultoo wants to, he wants to.’ Some people assumed that Choto-mama had to sit next to Shibli, with his spoilt ways, as a punishment from my grandfather. But that was not true: my grandfather had given Pultoo a large room with sunny windows on the ground floor of his house as a studio. He was rather proud of him, as I say.
Then his sister, Bubbly-aunty, the youngest of my aunts, and then Sunchita and Sushmita, my sisters. They sat at the end of the table, next to the television, which they could not see very well, and the fridge, which they often had to open and fetch something from for my grandfather.
The far end of the table was not a good place to sit, and there might be placed a village aunt or uncle, a cousin travelling to Dacca on business. And next to them, working back on the other side of the table, might be Dahlia-aunty, my favourite, and Era-aunty. And I was between them and my mother. My grandfather called me Churchill; the rest of the family called me Saadi. Dahlia would lean over and encourage me to eat, especially delicious little things; she would talk to me about pickles in her memory. Nadira I loved, because she was such a good singer, though, of course, not at the dinner table. And my mother sat by my grandfather, as the eldest daughter.
Two uncles, Boro-mama and Choto-mama, Big-uncle and Little-uncle; six aunts, Mary, Era, Mira, Nadira, Dahlia, Bubbly. Dahlia was my favourite and I was hers.
6.
Once, Pultoo-uncle was late for dinner. He was expected, but had gone out in the afternoon and had not returned by the time my grandfather came back. Pultoo had a wide circle of friends at the college of art, and occasionally he was seen in a café or ambling through a park, gesticulating and talking in the middle of ten friends. He was the only one in the family to wear traditional dress all the time, a long shirt and pyjama trousers. The rest of the family were proud of him, and thought that he could dress as he chose. He was thin and dark, with hair that swept back like a film star’s and big eyes set deep in his face. When he was excited, as, in conversation, he often was, his hands chopped the air, like a cook’s at work.
It was understood that Pultoo-uncle had gone out to a class at the college of art that morning.. My sister Sunchita and I had been allowed to watch the television in the dining room. We had seen Double Deckers, and Tom and Jerry, and a new programme made in Bangladesh. My sister, who liked to lie on her stomach on the dining-table when she watched television, had been shooed off when the table was set; the children’s programmes had come to an end, and the adults’ programmes begun. Soon it would be the news and dinnertime. About the house there was the sense that the kitchen was ready and waiting, the dishes now being kept warm. My grandfather was not a stickler about mealtimes, but he liked to know if someone was going to be late.
‘I hope nothing is wrong,’ Mary-aunty said.
‘Wrong?’ Era said, alarmed.
‘Nonsense, nothing could be wrong,’ Dahlia-aunty said, although everyone remembered the time, not so long before, when young men had failed to come home and were never seen again. That possibility lingered for many years, and people did their families the kindness of being punctual, on the whole, to save their nerves.
But Pultoo-uncle came in, as the clock in the hall struck eight, brushing his hair back with his hand and depositing a table-top-sized folder by the front door, apologizing as he came. Warm, he smelt of geraniums, and his long shirt was dusty with the red dust of the street. He had two friends with him, two other artists. Their names were Kajol and Kanaq. Kanaq fascinated me and my sisters because she came from a tribe; her appearance was highly exotic, with her slanted eyes and sleepy air. It was not unusual for Pultoo to bring friends for dinner, and these two often arrived at my grandfather’s house in the late afternoon on a Friday, and stayed for dinner with only a little urging, only one diffident invitation. They lived in lodgings, and I believe they enjoyed the chance of a family dinner. My grandfather did not really care who came for dinner; my grandmother, on the other hand, liked to be given the chance to offer an invitation.
‘Can we find space for these two?’ Pultoo said, when he came back from washing, his face wet and glistening, his white teeth shining. ‘I’m sure there is space.’
My grandmother muttered something, and went off to the kitchen with the bare appearance of graciousness.
‘I do like them,’ my sister Sunchita said, in her adult, mature, book-reading way about the guests, as we went back to the dining room to catch the rest of the television before the news started. ‘But their painting is awful.’
7.
When the news was finished, my grandmother asked Pultoo what he had been doing at the art college that morning. He asked her permission to get out the drawings from his life class, which he had left in the folder. He passed them round the table; they were charcoal drawings of a naked man sitting on a box. ‘I think this one is the best,’ my grandfather said simply, when they got to him.
‘And we were late because we were planning something,’ Pultoo said.
‘Yes,’ Mary-aunty said. ‘You certainly were late.’
‘Late, yes,’ Era said. She often agreed with her sisters, in an echo; she was shy and did not venture her own opinions easily. Even her echoes of opinions were often given first in the direction of her plate.
‘We really got carried away,’ Kanaq said, her slanting eyes looking at the biriani. ‘It is such a good idea.’
‘We are going to produce greetings cards,’ Kajol said. ‘People always like greetings cards – we are going to give them something special.’
My uncle went on to explain that their plan was for hand-made cards, sketches in pen and ink, in watercolours and in pencil, and to sell them on a stall in Ramana field in the first instance. ‘After that, if it is successful, we can think about opening a shop,’ Pultoo said. ‘It is such a good idea, I don’t know why no one has thought of it before.’
The cards would be for the new year. In Bangladesh, Choto-mama said, people were always sending cards for any reason; but they were mass-produced, the same cards that were sold anywhere, and did not speak to the sender or to the recipient. ‘I saw a birthday card,’ my uncle’s friend Kajol said. ‘It was a photograph of a mountainside in the Himalaya, I expect, and the message inside was “This is what I dream of . . .” It means nothing, that kind of thing. Produced in factories, designed by slaves.’
‘Yes,’ Pultoo said, in his excitable way. ‘People would not buy that if they could buy the sort of thing we are going to make for them.’
‘What sort of thing?’ my grandmother said.
I wondered whether their idea was to make cards with pictures of naked people on them. I did not think people would want to buy those. But Pultoo-uncle explained that they would be drawing and painting famous views in Bangladesh, typical scenes of Bangladesh, such as a village house or a tea plantation, perhaps even well-known corners of Dacca. ‘I would much prefer to see a hand-drawn picture like that,’ Pultoo said.
‘When are your teachers coming?’ Shibli called to Dahlia-aunty. ‘The musicians.’
‘Quiet, Shibli,’ Nani said, in her stagy way. ‘Don’t you have any respect? Your uncle is talking about your country.’
‘Your country, yes,’ Era said.
8.
The servants in my grandfather’s house held a fascination for me. I never knew how many there were. After Mary-aunty had put my sister and me to bed in the afternoons, we would often start up a row, a pillow fight, a shouting match, and soon she would come to see what the noise was. But she was somebody who could not pass another human being known to her in any degree without greeting them. So we could hear the passage of Mary-aunty through the house from her slapping chappals, and from a constant stream of greetings, and expressions of concern and interest: ‘Good afternoon, Rustum’; ‘how are your children, Timur; is your daughter happy with Mr Khandekar . . .’ That sort of thing. There were enough servants to slow her progress, to warn us and allow us to calm down and pretend to be asleep by the time she opened the door to shout at us.
My grandfather had a gardener called Atish. Over the years, he had become both an inside servant and an outside servant, according to need. I was not allowed to follow Atish about when he was inside, cleaning and polishing. When he was gardening, there were no objections to my walking about with him and asking him any number of questions. There was plenty to occupy him: the huge bougainvillaeas that poured out of pots and formed a blazing arch, the way that the terrace and entrance needed to be swept of dead leaves and flowers. He trimmed back the flowers in the flowerbeds; he carried out mysterious surgical operations with saw and secateurs on the fruit trees – the guava tree, the mango tree, the jackfruit tree, the banana tree, the tamarind tree, with its neatly diagrammatic leaves and its extravagant flower. There was plenty of digging and pruning and planting to do, with a small boy gazing and a chicken or two following round in the hope of an upturned worm.
Atish was a poor Hindu who was left behind in 1947. Grandfather and Grandmother had had to leave Calcutta in a great hurry and come to Dacca. Nana had bought a house in Rankin Street from a rich Hindu, who had had to leave Dacca in a great hurry and go to Calcutta. I wondered why they had not simply swapped their houses, but they had not. Atish had not gone like the rich Hindus to Calcutta: he had stayed where he was, and Grandfather had taken pity on him and employed him in the garden. It suited him.
Nana liked to employ poor and vulnerable people. All of them stayed for ever. And Nana’s relations with them sometimes surprised his friends, since he encouraged the people he employed to speak their minds to him. Sometimes they developed independent habits, which could prove inconvenient to the rest of the household. Rustum, Nana’s driver, was another of these vulnerable people, but after a while, he developed the habit of taking the car out on his own, or of ignoring instructions. Sometimes my grandmother would come out after lunch, expecting Rustum to be there to drive her to a friend’s house, and would find that he had gone out with the car, and no one knew where he had gone. When he came back, I had heard him blame Dahlia-aunty, saying that she had told him to go and fetch something from a shop on the other side of Dacca. She had demanded, he would say, a particular sort of sandesh, one that could only be got in a confectioner’s shop on Sadarghat. He knew the sort of blame that could be convincingly put on Dahlia. But if this got back to Dahlia-aunty, she would fly into a furious passion. It was the first thing that came into Rustum’s mind, it seemed, and it did not occur to him that anyone might ask Dahlia whether there was any truth in his story.
‘How could he? How could he? How could he?’ Dahlia would shout, sometimes audibly from outside the gates of the house. To passers-by and neighbours, it did not seem obvious that these screams were caused only by a servant’s unreliable events; surely, they must have thought, a husband or father must have threatened a beating to the victim, at the very least. But nobody beat anyone in Nana’s house, and Dahlia screamed because Rustum had pretended she had ordered him about.
Finally there came the terrible day when Rustum had a fight with Nana himself. It occurred in the week. When we arrived that Friday, Rustum was not there. This was not unusual, but it was strange that the red Vauxhall was in the garage when both Nana and Rustum were out of the house. When Nana came home, he came home in a cycle-rickshaw, and I understood that something atrocious had happened. Rustum had been asked to leave. ‘I could forgive him for taking the car without permission,’ my grandfather said, a week or two later when he could bring himself to talk about it. ‘But it was the lying afterwards I could not put up with.’ My grandfather, however, immediately felt guilty about evicting Rustum and his family from the flat in the servants’ block, and made it his business to find Rustum another place to live and even another job. When, five years later, Rustum was diagnosed with tuberculosis, my grandfather paid for his treatment.
Atish the gardener was not as popular with the children as Rustum. He did not have the glamour of a red Vauxhall car to carry out his trade, but only a spade, a hoe, a trowel and a fork; among his tools, only the secateurs, with their terrible grip and savage slice, had the power to fascinate. But I liked to follow him around the garden, and watch him at his tasks, and he did not object. Sometimes he let me undertake a small task to help him, such as filling his two watering-cans. If it was cold, Atish used to wear a shawl about his shoulders, a scarf wound right around his head, like a sufferer from the toothache; his set face emerged from a kind of red cotton nest on the coldest days of the year.
Atish would start work at the front of the house, where the tamarind tree shaded the entrance. There were always things to sweep up here. Then he would move on to the flowerbeds at the side of the house in the full sun, and then to the back of the house, with the other fruit trees, the lawn and, underneath the jackfruit tree, the chicken house. The chickens were allowed to wander the garden, eating whatever they could find. One of the days that Atish devoted to digging and turning over the earth in the flowerbeds was a festival day for the chickens, as they could eye and pounce on a worm or a beetle that Atish’s spade had uncovered. They stood, beadily eyeing his work, like supervisors in a factory.
The chicken house had been made and painted, decorated, by Choto-mama Pultoo. He had started it when he was still at school and showing signs of artistic and practical talent. He had painted a frame, put a tidy little net in its front, and then, he said, he had wondered what he would like in his house, if he were a chicken. So the chicken house contained the dead branches of trees for the chickens to perch on, and the back wall had a landscape painted by Pultoo. ‘So that they can think of the wide open spaces of the countryside, even when they are confined in a small garden in Dacca,’ Pultoo poetically observed. The chickens seemed to take more pleasure in the dead tree, on which they happily roosted and slept, than in the landscape, which they ignored. Within a few months, the mountain view was dimmed and smeared by chicken feathers and chicken shit. Pultoo was not put off, and carried on adding ornament and furniture to the chicken house in the hope of broadening their mental horizons. The latest was a series of terracotta yogurt pots, which he had decorated with some folk-like paintings of milkmaids.
‘Come on,’ Dahlia-aunty, who was a good sort, would sometimes say to me when we arrived at my grandfather’s house for the weekend. ‘Let’s go and see what Choto-mama has done to the chicken run this week.’
Atish never made any comment on Pultoo’s chicken run, or on the chickens themselves for that matter. He stayed silent on the subject, even when the cat next door got into the garden and killed three chicks. He ignored the chickens standing by his side, watching him hoe and dig, though he would pause in his regular rhythm if they darted forward to grab a worm.
I could stand there all morning, watching Atish work and the chickens eat the grubs he found for them. The only things he said to me were odd horticultural pieces of advice: it was necessary to prune a mango tree in March; the first sprouts from seeds that would turn into sunflowers must be thinned out when they had reached an inch tall; you could not water a bougainvillaea enough. It was as if he thought I was going to become a gardener like him when I grew up. The way he gave horticultural maxims is clear in my head, but not what he said exactly. I may have got them quite wrong. But I stood or squatted there all morning, watching Atish at work, watching the white chickens dart to and fro.
9.
My father came before lunch on Saturday. He did not come with a dramatic flourish, like my grandfather; he did not come with excitement, like my mother and my sisters. He came under a pile of papers, tied up with red ribbon, and in a pernickety, unenthusiastic way. Sometimes he was carrying so much that it threatened to overbalance him. It is not easy to travel with a large bundle of papers in the back of a cycle-rickshaw, and he often turned up with his arms in a desperate position, clutching them like a large escaping fish. I liked to watch him arrive. The cycle-rickshaw he always used was glittering silver, polished, with the faces of film stars under a setting sun painted on the back of its canopy; like many of the other rickshaws of Dacca, its canopy was lined with tinsel, like a fur-lined hood. The rickshaw driver, however, was a taciturn, serious man, whom you could not imagine decorating his vehicle in this way, and so was my father, sitting in the square middle of the rickshaw with his papers on his lap, his lawyer’s white bands around his throat.
Both I and my father were hypocrites – he, because he did not really want to come to my grandfather’s house: he was a government lawyer, my grandfather was a lawyer for the people, so they were always on opposite sides, and my grandfather could never resist needling him about this argument or other that he had undertaken with less success than he had hoped for. He came because he felt he ought to, and because the Bar library in which he did so much of his work closed at weekends.
I was a hypocrite because, towards the end of Saturday morning, I made a habit of going up to Nana’s balcony to watch out for Father’s arrival. The balcony had by far the best view down the street, and it was where anyone sat to keep an eye out for an eagerly awaited visitor. From there, you could see the curious events of the street: a handcart laden with megaphones, like silver tropical flowers, heading to a rally, or a pitiful hawker, selling a single useless part of a household object, such as the handles of a pressure cooker, laid out on a cloth in the forlorn hope of a purchaser. I went up there, making sure that everyone knew I was going up there, to watch out for Father’s arrival in a cycle-rickshaw. In fact, my father’s arrival was nothing to look forward to. I disliked the way my mother and aunts had less time for me, busy with meeting his needs. He was much more remote than my aunts and my mother, and the idea of creating fun for his children would not have occurred to him. I made a great performance out of my anticipation because I thought that was the right, or the dramatic, thing to do. But in fact I did not much care that I had not seen him since early breakfast on Friday, and would not have minded if I had not seen him until Monday morning. Like many little boys, I wanted to have my mother to myself, with her warm iron-scented flesh, her ripple of silk against my face when she embraced me.
The one thing that made the weekend visits to Nana endurable for my father was that Nana had an excellent law library of his own. Although the public law library was closed at weekends, my father could, once he had eaten lunch with the aunts, his parents-in-law and the children, retreat to Nana’s library and carry on working in its rusty warm light. Sometimes he would call Sunchita and me in, and set us the task to find a particular book in Nana’s library, or a particular case within a book. I believe he thought he was providing us with some fun, as well as with a little education.
The library had a double aspect: one barred window looked out to the tamarind tree at the front, the other at the flowerbed to the side. Out of the front window, I could see the watchman leaning on the bonnet of the red Vauxhall. The big front gate of the house was open, and he was talking to someone I could not see. From the side window, there was Atish, attending to the flowerbeds. There was no one to fill his watering-cans for him, and he was trudging backwards and forwards with an uncomplaining uneven gait, like a badly oiled clockwork toy that threatened to start walking in circles. ‘Liberty Cinema versus CIT,’ my father said, in his light-toned voice. ‘Have you found that one for me?’
Elsewhere in the house the television was on, and Shibli was watching; Mary-aunty’s slapping chappals were coming down the stairs, and she was greeting the cook by asking about her daughter. My grandfather was laughing somewhere. Behind everything, the quiet of the Dhanmondi street, and the peaceful burble of the chickens in the garden.
Chapter 2
The Game of Roots
1.
The children all around watched American television shows with absorption, and would not be distracted. They watched Knight Rider and Kojak, Dallas and Starsky and Hutch, and other things still less suitable for small children. Afterwards, they rushed out into the street, into each other’s gardens and homes, dizzy and full of games of re-enactment. For weeks after Starsky and Hutch had rescued a girl bound and imprisoned in a church crypt, nurses, ayahs, mothers and aunts kept discovering small girls in their charge tied up with washing line to jackfruit trees. They had been abandoned in the joy of the game and, unable to untie themselves, wailed until someone rescued them.
‘Little brutes,’ Dahlia-aunty would say, when Sunchita, Shibli and I roared in after a morning playing some delirious game, wild-haired and dirty. ‘Go and wash yourselves immediately.’
‘Immediately,’ Era would add.
The games were played in the street, in gardens, on any spare plot of ground, with fervour and without planning. When we came across a neighbour’s children or grandchildren, we would start a game of Starsky and Hutch without any discussion. We knew all the children for many houses around, all the short-cuts between gardens, and the houses we would be chased away from.
In the streets, we lost all our respectability, and became, as our aunts told us, little ragamuffins. Sometimes, in our racing about, we got as far as Mirpur Road, where we were forbidden to go on our own. It was exciting there: the streets were suddenly full of trades. You could see the aubergine-seller, frying white discs in his yellow oil, the black iron cauldron precariously balanced on the gas stove; the cracker of nuts; a pavement cobbler; the barber with his cut-throat razor attending to a man leaning back in a chair under a tree, a broken scrap of mirror all he had to work with to perfect the moustache. There was the chai-wallah with his little terracotta cups, waiting to be filled with tea, and a hundred potsherds lying around him from the morning’s custom. We raced around all of them, playing our TV games, further than we ever meant to go, ignoring their curses and delirious in our rule-breaking. We all knew that Mirpur Road was where a little boy had been kidnapped and eaten by starving people, and we ran through its chaos and indifference, yelling like urchins.
We played Kojak and Knight Rider and Double Deckers constantly, without much preference for one game over another. Perhaps there was not much difference between the games. Dallas was more of a girl’s game. My sisters never got tired of parading up and down the garden and pointing a vengeful finger at the small girl from Mrs Rahman’s house. ‘Ten million dollars!’ they would cry. The rest of us were happy pretending to be talking cars, being kidnappers, or trying to walk like Hungry Bear.
The hold these television programmes had over our imaginations was swept away in one moment by a new series. My aunts talked about it seriously some time before it even started. The whole world, they said, had watched this series, and now it was coming to us, to be shown on Bangladesh television. It was the first time I realized that the programmes we watched were not made especially for us, although most of the television we watched was about people who did not look at all like us.
The programme was called Roots, and was about a family of black people. They started by living in Africa, then were kidnapped and taken to America, where they were slaves. We were entranced. It did not seem to agree with our idea of America at all. The next day we lifted the bolt, pushed the iron gates open and ran out across the street, not troubling to close the gates behind us. For once, we did not mooch or loiter until we came across some children we knew. We banged on doors like drunkards, demanding that our playfellows came out. ‘Did you see Roots?’ we shouted, and everyone had. Finally, there were twenty children, all nearly overcome with excitement, spilling across the quiet street under the trees and shouting their heads off.
‘I want to be Kunta Kinte,’ one said.
‘No, I want to be,’ another said. And my sister said she would be Kunta Kinte’s wife. Shibli was a brother who was to be killed. He liked to be killed in games, so long as he could stand up straight away and go to be killed all over again.
‘So I’m walking down the riverbank with my wife,’ Kunta Kinte said, balancing along the gutter. ‘Oh, wife, wife, I love you so much.’
‘Oh, husband,’ Sunchita said. A fight was breaking out between the slave-traders and the Africans. ‘Stop it, stop it, you’ve got to watch me. Look, watch me, I’m walking with my husband Kunta Kinte.’
Shibli got up from being killed. ‘Who’s the chief slave-owner? I want to be the chief slave-owner.’
‘You can’t be,’ a boy called Assad shouted. ‘You don’t know how to kill anyone. I want to be the chief slave-owner. I want to come and put Kunta Kinte in chains and steal him to America.’
‘You don’t know how to kill anyone either,’ Sunchita said to Assad. He was a boy we only sometimes saw. We had not called at his house, three houses away; he had heard the noise and the shouts of ‘Roots’ and had come out of his own accord. ‘You can’t be the chief slave-owner.’
‘I know how people are killed,’ Assad said. ‘It’s not fair.’
I was clamouring like all the others to be allowed to be the chief slave-owner, the Englishman. That was the thing I wanted to be. And then a miracle happened. Kunta Kinte intervened and said, with calm authority, ‘Saadi should be the slave-owner. After all, he’s the palest among us. He can be the white man.’ And that was that, and I was the slave-owner, because, after all, Kunta Kinte was the hero of the game and what he said went.
Assad rushed at me with both fists flying. I hated to fight – when I fought with my sisters, it was always in play. I had never done anything worse to anyone than throw an orange directly at Sunchita’s head. I dodged behind my big sister Sushmita, who had no such reluctance. She pushed him, hard, and he fell over in the dust, wailing.
‘I don’t want to play this game,’ Assad howled. But he did not run away. The game was too good for that. In ten minutes’ time, he was lining up gleefully with all the other slaves behind Kunta Kinte and his wife, while I growled, ‘This is my slave ship, and you are all under my power for ever and ever.’ One of my two assistant slave-keeping Englishmen had got the plum role of the man with the whip – a torn-off vine – and he now dramatically brought it down on the backs of the ten slaves, hunched and moaning. Two small girls of the neighbourhood, the daughters of Mr Khandekar-nana’s niece, were happily screaming for help. They were tied with washing line to the roadside trees. Over the road, a houseboy was watching with fascination, perhaps wanting to abandon his duties and come over to join in. It was the best game we ever played, and we played it every Sunday afternoon for many weeks.
2.
Whenever a chick emerged from Pultoo-uncle’s chicken house, my sisters, Shibli and I would rush to see it. We would have warning. A mother hen would sit on her eggs inside the chicken house, blowing her feathers out into a big angry ball and clucking. And then one morning there would be some small puffs of yellowish feathers with the big feet of a toy, and eyes with a strange, tired, aged look. My sisters made small girlish piping noises to echo the little squeaks; Shibli would always pick one up, sometimes making the mother hen rush at him with her neck outstretched. The hens were so sharp and businesslike, getting on with their occupations, but their chicks were fluffy and yellow and not like animals at all, but like things run by inner machinery. I did not torment them, but liked to watch them, dipping their heads into the waterbowl left for them by Atish the gardener, running back to their mothers, making their small cries for attention. I could sit on my haunches, watching them, for hours.
Once, I was alone in the garden watching some day-old chicks in this way, quite silently. The others were inside – Sushmita was reading, Shibli was making a nuisance of himself in the kitchen, and Sunchita had been sent to bed in disgrace. I had seen chicks hatch from their eggs; the struggle inside the shell was hateful to me – I always feared that the effort would be too much for them. And when they emerged, they were so wet and slimy, so ugly, I could not help imagining how frightening they would be, with their sudden sharp gestures, if they were the same size as me.
But within hours they were small and round and fluffed quite yellow, and seemed nearly at home in the world. They stretched their plump little wings, like stubby fingers, and, not able to fly, fell from the chicken house on to the lawn under the jackfruit tree. Their movements were undecided and sudden, and you could not know what would cause them to take fright, or when they would move confidently.
‘They’re born standing,’ Atish the gardener said. He had laid down his tools and was now standing behind me. I think he liked watching the newly hatched chicks as much as I did. ‘Not like human beings. Human beings can’t feed themselves, they can’t walk, not for years. A chicken makes his own way out of the shell, punches his way out, and then he cleans himself off, and he stands on his two feet and off he goes like you or me. First thing he does is to find something to eat, and it’s the same food he’ll eat all his life.’
This was true. I watched the chicks pecking at the seeds on the ground. It was exactly what the fully grown chickens ate. From the house came the sound of music: Dahlia-aunty was having a music lesson, with tabla and harmonium, and her lovely singing voice filled the garden.
‘Can I have a chick of my own?’ I asked Atish.
‘It’s not for me to say,’ Atish said.
But he reached into the pocket of his grimy shirt and took out a chapatti. It might have been there for him to eat later, or it might have been in his shirt for some time. He tore off a corner and gave it to me. ‘If you get a chick to come to you,’ he said, ‘it will be your friend.’
I took it, and held it out on the palm of my hand. I had the attention of the chicks. I lowered my hand almost to the ground. After a moment, a chick detached itself from the others, and came up, quite boldly, investigating. He pecked swiftly at the corner of the chapatti in the palm of my hand. He was not committing himself, staying in a place he could run from if I turned out to be an enemy, tempting him into a trap. I wondered at the cunning of a creature so small and so young in days. But then, as I did not move, but just let him go on pecking at the corner of Atish’s chapatti, he made some kind of decision, and hopped up on to the palm of my hand, where he could get at the bread more comfortably. He was darker than the other chicks, almost brown in hue, with two parallel black squiggles along his back, running along where his wings were.
‘You see?’ Atish said. ‘That one likes you. He’ll always remember you, now.’
‘How can he remember?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ Atish said. He threw his shawl over his shoulder, picked up his fork again. ‘But he always will. Sometimes when they come up to you, they think that you’re their mother, and then they never change their mind.’
The idea that my chick thought I was his mother was so funny that I trembled with laughter. The chick jumped off my hand, but did not run away; he went on pecking nonchalantly around my hand as if the movement of my laughter had been an inexplicable quake. And in a moment he returned to me, and hopped back on my palm.
When I went back into the house, I told everyone that I had a chicken all of my own and had decided to call him Piklu. My sisters, Mary-aunty and Bubbly-aunty, who had come from Srimongol to visit, all came out to see my chicken. ‘Don’t go too close,’ Mary-aunty warned. ‘You’ll upset the mother and she might even eat her own chicks.’ But I knew that would not happen, unless my sisters and aunts came running across and crowded them. I approached the mass of new chicks pecking at the ground before the chicken house, walking softly, and what happened did not surprise me at all. The chick with the two black squiggles down its back, the one a little darker than the others, detached itself quite easily from its brothers and sisters and came to say hello to me. I squatted down, and held out my hand, and the chick hopped happily on to my palm.
‘This is Piklu,’ I said. ‘He’s my chicken.’
And Bubbly-aunty was so impressed, she went to fetch Dahlia out of her music lesson to show her.
3.
Every aunt had her occupation – to paint, to cook, to help Nana with legal research, to attend to the chickens. Bubbly, who loved food, was forever in the kitchen, though her particular task was to supervise the making of the pickles. Mary’s was to keep the children in order; Nadira’s was to sing. Though she was in Sheffield now, the other aunts talked about her ceaselessly. I could remember her wedding, how beautiful it had been, how beautiful she had been. Her singing had been good enough for her to appear on Bangladeshi television, performing Tagore songs. ‘Do you think she has her own programme, by now, on British television?’ Mary asked guilelessly.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ Nani said.
At the time when Tagore was banned by the Pakistanis, before independence, Nadira had hidden her music with all the other Bengali music, poetry and books in the secret cellar at my grandfather’s house. When it was safe to bring it out again, it was clear that she had not forgotten any of it. That was her occupation.
Dahlia was my favourite aunt. Nadira had been fascinating and dramatic, always ready to shout and stamp or even to cry for effect in public. But she could also say, ‘Be off with you, wretched child.’ Dahlia was as fragrant as Nadira had been, and as pretty as her name. She, too, had her music. It was understood that Nadira was a better singer, but Dahlia took lessons from the two musicians who came to the house. Her occupation, however, since Nadira had taken music as her first choice, was to sew: she embroidered very deft, very intricate scenes of country life, not using patterns, but quite out of her head. If you asked her, she would explain that this figure was a man she had seen working in the fields near my grandfather’s village last summer, that this was his wife, waiting for him at home and cooking a delicious supper, that these were what she imagined his children looked like, and these were the mountains in the distance, with cows and goats on them. Pultoo was very scathing about Dahlia’s sewing and her designs, but many people loved them, and she was always being asked for her next one by friends of the family. It often took her a year or more to finish one, however, and they tended to stay in the family, in the rooms of the children of this aunt or that. Sometimes Dahlia just placed them in a large biscuit box she had at home, and only took them out if you asked her.
Sunchita had once asked her if she could make a picture of something in particular, a picture of children she knew, queuing up and travelling on an aeroplane. Sunchita had asked for this very fervently, but Dahlia-aunty had laughed and said she would make that for her, one of these days. That day had not yet come. I had one of Dahlia’s tapestries on my wall at home, and I had named every single figure in the image, and had a good idea of their relation to each other, the stories they were embarked upon.
Dahlia was busy in a corner of the salon, her head bent over her half-finished work. She heard me coming in, and called to me. There was no one else in the room, and I went to sit by her. She tutted, and smoothed my hair; she took a sweet-smelling folded handkerchief from the short sleeve of the dark blue blouse under her sari. She spat a little into it, and wiped my cheeks, one after the other. I must have been smudged from the street. ‘Little urchin,’ she said.
‘Dahlia-aunty,’ I said, and told her all about the Roots game we had been playing. I went into details. She listened patiently, laughing sometimes.
‘I wondered what you were all doing,’ she said. ‘Nani came down from upstairs where she had been dressing the mango to dry, and said that she had never been so shocked. She saw a group of street-urchins tearing up and down the street, making a terrible din, and she thought that never had such a thing been heard of in Dhanmondi.’
‘And it was us, wasn’t it, Dahlia-aunty?’ I said happily. I took her hand, and pulled the thimble off her forefinger; that silver top joint of the finger was fascinating to me, and I could only think of it as a sort of toy. I loved to put my finger into it, and twirl it about.
‘She called down to me, and I went up, and then the whole gang of you rushed past, and I said to Nani, “I think I know one or two of those street-urchins.”’
‘Are we in trouble?’ I asked.
Dahlia held up her needle to the light, licked the end of the blue thread, rethreaded the needle. She unsmilingly held out her hand, and I, smilingly, took the thimble off my too-thin finger. Instead of putting it on the palm of the hand she held out, I reached around and put it on the finger of her left hand; an intimate, professional thing to do, like a servant’s task. She gave way: she smiled, and gave me a kiss.
‘Who are those boys that you play with?’ she said.
‘I told you once,’ I said, exasperated. I ran through the names, but she stopped me.
‘Assad,’ she said. ‘Is that the little boy who lives three houses away?’
‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘I don’t like him at all. He wanted to be the slave-owner, but everyone said I should do it, and he cried at first, but now he just wants to be another slave-owner. He doesn’t play the game properly.’
‘But he lives, doesn’t he, three houses away? I mean, to the left, up the road, towards the main road?’
I thought, and then agreed.
‘Saadi,’ she said, ‘I want you to promise me that you won’t go to that boy’s house, and you won’t ask him here. You can play with him in the street, if there are lots of other children, like today, but don’t go to his house, and don’t have anything to do with his big brothers, or his father, or any of his family. Can you promise me that?’
I promised. ‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go to his old house, anyway.’
‘Has he asked you?’
‘No,’ I had to admit.
‘If he asks you, don’t go,’ Dahlia-aunty said. ‘Your grandfather wouldn’t like it. You know why. Now. I’ve been hard at work all afternoon – my fingers are red raw, look. Shall we have our tea, just you and I?’
I felt I had made a solemn and binding contract with my aunt, something which was beyond my sisters’ capacity, and it was with an adult’s serious walk that I went to the kitchen to call for tea and biscuits. If a guest had brought some or the kitchen had made some, there might be semai, chumchum, or rosogallai. These were the sweets that my aunt and I liked to eat together.
When my aunt said to me that I was not to play with Assad, and that I knew the reason why, she spoke the truth. At that time, there was only one reason why we did not associate with people of the neighbourhood, and that reason was known to everyone in the house, from the oldest visitors from the village down to the smallest child. It came to us as we woke, and was with us when we went to bed. We understood very well the reason why a child was forbidden our company. When Dahlia gave me this instruction I understood very well that it must have been his father who had sided with the Pakistanis.
4.
In Dhanmondi, where my grandfather lived, associations between neighbours were generally relaxed and easy. A gardener or a chauffeur would be lent without a thought; the women went between houses all day long. This was even true of the president of the country, Sheikh Mujib, whose house was four away from Khandekar-nana’s house. My mother used to tell the story of going to visit Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, at her father’s house, to find her in a terrible rage. She had been expecting a certain number of bags of chilli to be sent up from their estate in the country; the bags had arrived, but there were two short. ‘There should be two more! Two more!’ Sheikh Hasina had shouted, over and over. She barely paused in her rage to greet my mother.
‘Imagine that,’ my mother said. ‘Her father is the president of the country, and she was angry for the lack of two bags of chilli, which she could well afford to buy from the market.’
But there were some families in the neighbourhood who walked out alone, with their heads held high; we did not know them, and we did not lend our servants to them; we did not greet them, and my grandfather said their names were unfamiliar to him. There were a number of families like this. If the children of such a family walked out with their ayah, they would walk in a regimented way, in their best clothes, looking neither to left nor to right. That expression, with a head held high, not scanning the horizon but directed forward, like a horse with blinkers, was characteristic of all of them. When the gate of their house was opened, and a car drove out, with some older members of the family in it, you saw it then, that upright, distant, ignoring expression. They would not catch the eyes of anyone in the street. You could recognize these families. They dressed beautifully, dustlessly, in conventional and traditional ways. My aunts mostly put their clothes together from this and that; Mary-aunty thought nothing of borrowing her brother Pultoo-uncle’s stained painting jacket to wear on top, if she was cold.
‘Why can’t you dress like Nadira?’ Nani would say to her daughters, if they seemed to be going too far – if, say, she recognized an old pinstriped jacket of Nana’s on Era’s back on a cold January morning.
‘Like Nadira?’ Era would say, astonished.
Unlike Nadira, whose passion for clothes and makeup was legendary, they all shuffled about in old pairs of chappals, or slippers trodden down at the heel. It was accepted that they did. But Nani would not ask why her daughters could not dress like those neighbours of theirs. Those other families were immaculate in appearance, and they dressed as if they were living in the year 1850. They were the only ones in the neighbourhood where the women wore veils before their faces, where the men wore a covering on their heads. That was why I had not recognized the boy Assad for the type that he was.
These families mixed with each other, but not with us. To see the men with their friends was always unexpected; then they were at ease, greeting, laughing, chatting quite easily, their wives and sisters to one side. For those moments, despite their immaculate clothes, they resembled our own families, but of course they were not like them at all. And then they would say goodbye, and without warning, the men would resume that remote gaze of theirs. They would not acknowledge their nearest neighbours, and their nearest neighbours would ignore them, too. It was as if there were two cities laid on top of one another, each quite invisible to the other, each engaging only with its own sort.
A child knew what these people had done. They had taken money from the Pakistanis; they had betrayed their own kind; they had worked on behalf of the foreigners. They had taken the wrong side in the war, and that would never be forgotten. They had fled, often, to Pakistan, and had returned with the amnesty, buying a big house in Dhanmondi with the money they had made out of threatening Hindus and denouncing intellectuals. That was what we all believed of them. ‘If everyone had their just deserts,’ my aunts would say, ‘such a person would not be living opposite your grandfather. They would be in jail.’ And yet explaining to Assad that he must leave us and must play with his own kind was beyond me. He came from a family we could not mix with, and I did not like him. But I could not banish him on my own.
5.
During the week we lived at home and I went to school. We had no car and no television, and there were only the six of us: my mother, my father, my two sisters, my brother and myself. It was quiet in our house, and my mother’s attention was all on my father’s needs. My brother Zahid was to become an engineer, and his serious spirit filled the house in the evenings. I was to become a lawyer, like my father and grandfather, but although my head was bent over my books, I was only pretending to get on with my work. At school, my teachers were always shouting at me and throwing pieces of chalk at my head when they saw that I was daydreaming. My sister Sunchita was eleven months older than I, and was in the same class. She was always being held up as an example to me, with her eagerness to read, her love of studying; in the bosoms of my teachers, the memory of my serious, intelligent, practical brother Zahid was just as warm, although he was ten years older than I was. My teachers could show me that I was not as good a student as Sunchita, who basked in the praise, and they were certain that I would not grow up to match Zahid. I knuckled down – and pretended to concentrate on the picture book of geography. The boy I sat at a desk with tugged our shared copy back into his half, and I kicked him.
At school and at home, pretending to work, I was thinking only of one thing. I was thinking of my chicken, Piklu. Piklu had a carefree life compared to mine. He woke up and made a brave little leap from the brink of Choto-mama’s chicken coop into the garden. There would be fresh seeds to peck at, fresh worms to eat. He would puff out his little feathers, and go to explore the new morning. And that was all he had to do all day long. I worried that he would miss me. He would look about to see if I was there, but there would be only Atish, to whom one chicken was much the same as another.
My weeks were filled with worry on Piklu’s behalf. While I was not there, he might eat a poisonous berry by mistake, not knowing the difference. Or a cat might get into the garden and kill him. This had happened once before, and the neighbour whose cat it was had merely apologized and told my grandfather that these things would happen. The cat must have returned to its owner with a prowling, sated gait, blood around its mouth and its whiskers adorned with fluffy yellow feathers. They must have known what it had done, but they had not cared. I could not endure that such a thing might happen to Piklu.
There were other dangers that might fall on him while I was not there. But the first among these was that Piklu might forget me between Sunday night, when we left, and Friday, when we returned to my grandfather’s house.
It is astonishing how fast a chicken grows. From one week to another, an almost globular chick turns into a grey bony thing, with a great beak and awkward corners, and then, no more than a week or two later, into something that resembles a chicken, its feathers puffing out. Piklu had changed every time we arrived at my grandfather’s house, and I hardly recognized him. But he recognized me. When I came towards the chicken coop, Piklu separated himself from the rest of the flock and came to greet me. I recognized him from the two irregular lines down his back, and I bent down to give him some crumbs I had kept for him. He was my chicken and I was his boy. The bond between us made Shibli jealous, but it amused almost everyone else: I had said I wanted a chicken of my own, and I had bound a chicken to me by willpower.
The best Roots game remained the one of capture and imprisonment. That was because of what came at the end of it: the game of auctioning off the captured slaves. There was a dramatic poignancy to that, which Shibli, who played the auctioneer, never failed to exploit. First the Africans played house, quietly at home in Africa before the slave-drivers came. Then I arrived with my henchmen, cracking whips and making the Africans scream and run. Once you had touched an African on both shoulders simultaneously, they came on to your side and chased the remaining Africans until they were all transformed. Then Shibli played the auctioneer, and sold the slaves.
‘What am I bid for this fine slave?’ he called, as I growled and pranced. Half of the Africans had to take the role of the bidders at the auction, or it would not have worked out. ‘Am I bid one thousand dollars? Two thousand? Three?’ Or sometimes he would vary it by suggesting that nobody would bid more than one cent for this miserable slave, and give them away for nothing. Nobody knew what Shibli would do; the auction part of the game filled us with a terrible, inexpressible excitement. It was what we looked forward to most.
The game started almost immediately after lunch for most of us, and continued all afternoon. It began as soon as enough people were there to join in. Assad came later. His family were religious – his mother, big sisters and aunts covered their faces with a veil, and his father, uncles and brothers, like Assad, wore a cap, a tupi, on their heads. When the call to prayer was heard, five times a day, none of my family took the slightest notice, and most of my grandfather’s neighbours were the same. But you could see the family of Assad hurrying home, and we knew that they all prayed constantly. For this reason Assad was never there at the start of the game. He appeared at five o’clock, between prayers; sometimes he would say that he had given his father the slip, that he had gone to the mosque but had left him behind. He seemed to have no sense of decorum; he did not know that it should have been embarrassing and shameful to him to admit to having parents at all.
Everyone in the game had seen my chicken Piklu. He was famous in the neighbourhood. Everyone – friends of my aunts, visiting cousins from the village, the children of the Roots game and their families – had come to see Piklu. The way he separated himself from the flock and came to greet me, but only me, was celebrated in Dhanmondi. ‘Have you seen Saadi’s chicken?’ people would be saying, or so I imagined, all over Dhanmondi. ‘You should visit. It is worth the visit.’
If the subject came up while Assad was there, he would squat on his haunches against a wall and say nothing; he would smile in a secretive, silly way, and wait for the conversation to turn to something else. He had nothing to say about my chicken. Because, of course, he could not come to see it; I was forbidden to ask him to my grandfather’s garden, and I was not sure I was really allowed to include him in the game. His uncle and father had taken money from the Pakistanis, and had told them where they could find intellectuals – musicians, poets, scholars, professors, schoolteachers – to kill. Everyone knew that, and knew that they would never be prosecuted for it. So Assad, in his tupi, with his fact-hiding, knowing smile, would never be allowed to come into my grandfather’s garden to see Piklu.
6.
It was easy to escape from my grandfather’s house, and when Mary-aunty had put us to bed in the afternoon, I let her walk away, then started to plot my manoeuvres. The most exciting was to get out of the bedroom, cross the landing into my grandfather’s room and go out on to his balcony. There might be drying pickles out there, or just my grandfather’s chair. He did not rest in his room in the afternoon, but said he would work in his library, often going to sleep there in his armchair. Only once did I come into his room to find him, his legs stretched out, on the balcony. ‘Churchill!’ he said. But normally it was possible to leave the aunt’s room, go into my grandfather’s room and through on to his balcony without discovery.
I noticed, from the balcony, that the front gate had been left open when the car had been brought in. A thought came to me. In a moment I had gripped the branch of the tamarind tree, and in another I had shinned down it. The house and the garden were absolutely quiet. I sauntered out of the front gate gleefully.
A small figure in the street, a hundred or two hundred yards away, was disturbing the peace of the afternoon. A ball of red dust with arms and legs emerging, like a fight in a comic, stopped under a tree. The dust subsided, and it turned out to be Assad in white shirt and tupi, kicking up the dirt, his arms windmilling with aimless fury. I went towards him.
‘I was supposed to go to the mosque,’ he said. ‘But I ran away and hid, and they went without me.’
‘I was put to bed,’ I explained. ‘But I got out.’
‘Where’s everybody?’ he said, sinking down and jogging up and down on his haunches. ‘I thought everybody would be here.’
I shrugged. I thought it was possible that the others had seen Assad on his own, and decided not to come out. You could not play the Roots game of slave and slave-owner with only two: what role would I play, and what role would be Assad’s? Other people in the game might have thought this, and remained inside their houses. My aunt had told me I was allowed to see Assad if there were plenty of other people around, but I knew she would not like it if he became a friend of mine.
Other families must have said the same thing. I was always susceptible to pathos when I was a child. When Mary-aunty’s cat gave birth to kittens, one of the kittens fell from the balcony in the night and was found dead in the morning. My sisters and I were inconsolable; we gave it a funeral and a little gravestone, and decorated the mound of the grave with flower petals. There was something noble to me about the state of being moved, and we tried to encourage Mary-aunty’s cat to stand with us as we wept over the unnamed kitten; she would not, however. So, when I saw Assad in the street, kicking at the dust and trying to see if he could rotate his arms in opposite directions, I thought of everyone who had seen him alone and decided not to come out. It was a terrible but a sad business, being the son of an informer.
‘Have you seen my chicken Piklu?’ I said.
Assad brightened. ‘No,’ he said. I knew he had not.
‘Do you want to see him now?’ I said. Naughtiness came over me. But I felt it was in an admirable cause. I was following a higher duty than family commandments. I went behind my aunts’ backs and offered friendship to Assad because he was separated from his family, and still nobody would greet him. In that moment, I assigned fine feelings to him, and a future in which we sloped off school and went fishing together.
‘You’re not allowed to invite me,’ he said, his face falling.
‘There’s no one about,’ I said. ‘I don’t care whether you come into the garden or not.’
‘My father says I’m not supposed to play with you,’ he said.
‘Where’s your father now?’ I said, shocked; I had not thought that the prohibition went in both directions.
‘I don’t want to see your chicken, anyway,’ Assad said.
‘Yes, you do,’ I said. ‘I know you do.’ I turned back to my grandfather’s house, and Assad trotted beside me. ‘He knows who I am,’ I said. ‘He comes to me whenever I go into the garden and I call his name. He’ll take food from my palm. He’s getting big now – he’s almost a full-grown chicken.’
‘Does he think you’re his mother?’ Assad said.
‘No, he knows who I am,’ I said.
‘How big is he?’ Assad said, as we went through the front gate of the house. ‘Is he big enough to cook and eat yet?’
‘No one’s going to cook and eat him,’ I said. ‘He’s not that sort of chicken. He’s my chicken, my special chicken.’
‘Just because he’s got a name doesn’t mean they won’t come and get him for the pot,’ Assad said. ‘If they know his name and they recognize him, they might come and get him first.’
We came round the house into the garden. There was nobody there, not even Atish the gardener.
‘No one would do that,’ I said. Assad had let me down with his scepticism, and I was full of scorn for him now. He understood nothing; he did not understand Piklu’s place in our household. He did not deserve to be introduced to Piklu. The chickens were scattered about, feeding from the ground, like walking clouds against a dark sky. They raised their heads and, just as I had promised, Piklu with the two scribbled brown lines down his back came straight to me with joy in his strut.
I had nothing to give Piklu. I felt in my pockets, but there was nothing there. He pecked enquiringly around me, walking backwards and forwards like a sentry before me. ‘This is Piklu,’ I said. ‘Did you see how he came straight to me? That’s because he recognizes me. He knows he’s my chicken.’
‘How do I know that’s the chicken you said is yours?’ Assad said. ‘All I saw is a chicken that came over looking for food. It could be any chicken.’
Assad was horrible, I saw that now. But I knew that we were not horrible to horrible people. That was not the way we were. We understood that it was our responsibility to behave in civilized ways, even when we were confronted with uncivilized people. So I said, quite mildly, ‘You can tell it’s Piklu because he has those two lines down his back. He had those when he was a chick, straight from the egg.’
‘You could just have said that,’ Assad said. ‘What else does your chicken do? It doesn’t do anything interesting.’
‘He doesn’t have to do interesting things,’ I said. ‘He’s not in a circus. He’s my chicken. Anyway, you don’t do interesting things. I’ve never seen you do anything interesting. Piklu’s much nicer and more interesting than you are.’
‘I can do lots of interesting things. I know how to do all sorts of things you don’t,’ Assad said. His voice had coarsened and deepened. ‘I know how . . .’ He lowered himself by stages, gently, gently, towards the ground, and then, quite suddenly, his hand shot out and caught Piklu round the neck. ‘I know how to kill a chicken.’
Piklu was trapped by the neck under Assad’s hand; his feet were running frantically in the dust.
‘The principle is the same,’ Assad said. ‘It’s the same for anything that you want to kill. You slice through the neck –’ for one moment I thought he had a knife in his pocket, that he was going to kill Piklu in front of me, but he was just slicing against Piklu’s white throat with the edge of his hand ‘– and then it bleeds to death, quite quickly. It makes a terrible mess, my father said. Not with a small animal like a chicken. But with bigger animals, it makes a big mess.’
I knew this was true. I had seen the slaughter of a cow in the street at the festival of Eid, and walked afterwards through the slip of blood on stone, the gallons of blood churning the streets into mud, the stench filling the street, like the crowd, pressing up against you. And afterwards, the stink that came from the tanneries, down by the river. It was unavoidable if you had to take a boat from Sadarghat, and the smell of the black water was the smell of large animals being slaughtered. If you lived in Dacca, you knew the big mess that a bigger animal made when it was killed.
All at once I could move. I rushed at Assad, screaming, my fists held high, and he let Piklu go. My chicken jumped to its feet, shuffling its feathers, and ran away to the far corner of the garden. I hit Assad with both my fists in the certainty that Piklu would now never again come to me of his free will: he would remember the day that I had asked him to come to me and I had delivered him to Assad. He would remember being held down by his throat against the dirt, and the thought that he was about to die, and he would run from me. I pummelled Assad, and he hit me back, his tupi flying from his head.
Then Nani, my grandmother, was in the garden. ‘Stop that at once,’ she said. ‘Brawling like street-urchins. Stop it. I’m ashamed of you, Saadi. What would Nana have to say? Do you think he would call you Churchill now?’
We stopped, our faces lowered towards the mud our fight had made. Grown-ups, when they interrupted our fights, had a way of insisting that we shook hands, apologized and made up with each other. It was their way. But Nani inspected Assad, his dirty shirt, his muddy hair, and the tupi lying on the leaves of a shrub, like washing laid out to dry, and made no such demand. ‘I know who you are,’ she said to Assad, taking his dirty head in her hands, turning it this way and that, like a shopkeeper with a fine vase. ‘I want you to leave my garden now, and never come back. You should never have come into my garden. Go away.’
Assad went. Nani watched him go every step of the way; she followed him to the gate, and shut it behind him with her own hands. ‘I don’t know how that was left open,’ she said. ‘Saadi, go and have a bath. I’m ashamed of you.’
7.
It was our ayah’s job to go and hail a cycle-rickshaw to take us, each Friday morning, from my parents’ house to my grand-parents’. When she opened the gates, you could see the woman who always squatted there, under the tree, breaking bricks and stones into rubble all day long; her skin was dry and white with the dust, and we were forbidden to speak to her. While our ayah was finding the cycle-rickshaw, my mother lined us up and inspected us. My sisters were wearing their best frocks; I was in my newest and whitest shirt. My brother was coming with us, unusually. He was wearing his best shirt. We knew what this meant, and before we set off, my mother asked us to behave especially well. There were people coming to Nana’s from the village. They were especially looking forward to seeing us, and we should not disappoint them by rolling in the mud, by saying that we were bored and could we watch the television, or by stuffing rice into our cheeks at the dinner table and pretending we were rats. That was always disgusting for other people, but it would be very disappointing for Nana’s visitors to see us behaving in such a way. ‘That was only Saadi,’ my sister Sushmita said.
My sister Sunchita whispered into my ear, ‘It’s the witch who’s coming,’ when we were safely jammed into the cycle-rickshaw – our ayah had found a good one, polished silver with a big picture of a tiger on the back. ‘It’s her time of year to come.’ The rickshaw driver fastened his blue cotton lungi between his hairy, bony knees, above the cycle crossbar, spat into the dry earth of the street, and we set off.
Our great-grandmother was called by Sunchita and me ‘the witch’ for no very good reason, except that she scared us. She was the last of the two widows of Nana’s father. I could just about remember the other one, and what they had been like. They had lived together where they had always lived, in Nana’s father’s house in the village. Nana’s father was the last person in the family who had married more than one woman; the question had never arisen afterwards, and now never would. The elder of the two had died when I was very small and, until then, they had come to see Nana once a year, around this time. The surviving one had carried on. Nana never travelled from Dacca to her village, although he sent small presents whenever any of his children went there in the summer. Nana always chose saris for her; he liked her to wear white saris with a thin band of colour, of blue or purple, at the edge, or sometimes a band of silver. (I could still remember her and the elderly senior wife, matching in their white and purple saris.) And the second one, the survivor, came to Dacca every year, in the summer, where she frightened, without knowing it, her great-grandchildren.
At Nana’s house, everything was in a state of confusion. The gardener’s boy was cleaning the car with a bucket of water; Atish was weeding the flowerbed. In the upper windows, great white birds appeared to be plunging in the half-light; beds were being changed and aired. My great-grandmother had arrived, and had found fault. The servants, who were used to their own ways, did not look forward to her visits any more than I did. Attention fell on her in unwelcome ways; attention was simultaneously taken from me, and neither of us enjoyed it.
We were led upstairs in our best clothes, and there in her room was my great-grandmother. The maid who always served her was already hard at work, brushing her hair; it was absolutely white – ‘As white as snow,’ I dreamily said to myself, a comparison from English books and not from experience. She could keep her maid hard at it all day long, going from one intimate task to another. While her hair was being brushed, she was at work preparing paan. She had her own pestle and mortar for this, and would prepare paan to chew; sometimes Nani took some, out of politeness, to give her mother-in-law some company. She pounded away at the tiny red rubble in her wooden bowl, the wooden pestle long since stained as if with blood. Her task was like that of the woman stone-breaker outside her house, but fragrant, elegant, clean and beautiful. She did not trust or like preparations of paan that had been made by anyone else. She carried the ingredients round in small pouches, making it out of dried leaves, pebble-like substances, samples of mysterious red matter, all just as she liked it. Her pestle and mortar, as well as the wooden clogs she always wore that gave you warning of her approach, were somehow carried over from the senior wife. She seemed to be carrying out a dead woman’s wishes, and she scared the life out of me.
We submitted to being kissed by a paan-smelling old mouth, and my mother reminded her who we were, and how old we were now. She seemed to take it all in, nodding over her stained moustaches. But then she immediately started explaining who had done what to whom in the village. She lived in a large property, given to both women by my grandfather, and she was the centre of village complaint and litigation. Everyone had always come to the pair of them with disputes, and nowadays she passed down the law without hesitation.
(Nana had a story about his mothers’ intrusions. He told it endlessly. It seemed that a village couple had decided to give their new baby daughter a Western name, and had somehow heard of ‘Irene’. Unexpectedly, the mother gave birth not to one daughter, but to a pair of twins, and the couple could not think of a suitable second name for some time. Then they were struck by inspiration, and decided to call the second daughter ‘Urine’. This was one of the many occasions on which my great-grandmothers descended into the private lives of the villagers, and told them what they could not do, brooking no contradiction. Nana could never remember what the daughters were called in the end, with the agreement of his father’s two wives.)
The stories of litigation and irritation reached their first pause, and the enquiries had run their course into how Zahid was growing up into a fine young man, and I would be a lawyer like my father and grandfather. My mother had gently reminded her that Sushmita and Sunchita would have their own professions, too. We were permitted to go downstairs, but only to sit quietly and to read a book, not to turn on the television, not to trouble the servants, and certainly not to go out and run in the garden, just underneath the window of Great-grandmother’s room.
I wanted to see Piklu, my chicken, but I knew better than to disobey my mother when the witch was there. We filed downstairs and took up our books in the salon, sitting on two cream-and-brown sofas at right angles to each other, Sunchita reading a long sentimental novel, Sushmita a Feluda detective story, and my brother Zahid a physics textbook, which seemed to give him as much pleasure as anything. From time to time, Sunchita would sigh affectedly at some occurrence in her book, and even remark on an event that had moved her. I had my book, too, but I could not stay still. I thought of Piklu, out there; I did not know if he would come to greet me, or whether I would remain unforgiven for what Assad had done to him the previous weekend. Piklu changed from week to week, although now he was a proper, grown-up chicken, as big as his mother, and I did not want to be separated from him. From time to time I leapt up from the scratchy wool sofa, going to the window to see if I could see Piklu. But I could not. The other chickens were pottering about, pecking at the dirt as usual, but Piklu must have been inside the chicken coop, waiting for me to come.
8.
‘Ah, children,’ Mary-aunty said, coming into the salon. She, too, was wearing her best clothes, with a gold band down the edge of her sari. ‘I hope you’re all being good. Oh dear.’ She fluttered, and left. In a moment Dahlia came in. She came straight to me, picked up the book I was reading from my lap and looked at the title. Ignoring the others, she gave me a kiss on my nose; she shook her head, and hurried out again.
The aunts came in, singly and in pairs, and found some reason to address me before leaving in an absent way. I could not account for it. My aunts had different favourites, and sometimes our own gestures of fondness were not returned; Sushmita had thought Nadira, with her dramatic entrances and her immaculate appearance, was marvellous, but Nadira, before she got married and went to Sheffield, was at best indifferent to the small, impressed offerings of gaze and giggle that Sushmita laid at her feet. Today every aunt came in and, one after another, stroked my head or called me a little sweetie. It was as if they wanted something from me. It was unusual in any circumstance: when Great-grandmother was there, making demands and criticizing the household, calling for people to brush her hair and listen to her stories, we children were used to being ushered into a quiet corner and expected to remain silent. The attention I was getting was pleasing, but unnerving. I wondered whether I was about to get a present.
‘And he is studying at college now,’ Great-grandmother said at table. She was talking about the son of a neighbour of theirs, a neighbour in the country. ‘Studying to be an engineer. He has made a good success of his life. When you consider who his father is. There was constant trouble with his father. Running wild. And now he is going to Libya,’ she finished, hunching over her plate.
‘Fateh is going to Libya?’ Nana said, puzzled. He remembered the farmer, his youth, running wild.
‘Libya?’ Era said.
‘Not Fateh,’ Great-grandmother said, her brilliant white hair combed back now. ‘Fateh could never go to Libya. Fateh stays where he was born. His son, he is going to Libya. He is studying at college. Studying to be an engineer. And afterwards, he is going to Libya.’
There was a satisfied pause. The dining-room door swung open, and in came a succession of dishes, steaming hot. All at once, the table broke into conversation.
‘Were you at your college today?’ Dahlia called across to Pultoo-uncle.
‘No, because—’
‘And Mahmood had a great success today,’ my mother called across to Nani, gesturing at my father who, in honour of a great-grandparent, had come, for once, to dinner on Friday.
‘I’m so pleased for him,’ Nani said. ‘Era, did you hear what your sister was saying?’
‘Yes, Mama,’ Era said. ‘A success, today . . . I was just about to say . . .’
It was mystifying. The lids of the dishes were taken off, in a shining line down the long table; the richest of the dishes before Nana. ‘Good, good,’ he said, poking in it with the serving spoon in his usual way; it was as if he suspected the most delicious parts to be always hidden deep in the dish. ‘Good. Chicken.’
Around the table, there was a nervous little spasm of conversation, and I had the sense of aunt turning to aunt, and smiling shamefully at me. ‘Do have some, Saadi,’ Mary-aunty said. ‘It’s especially for your great-grandmother, since she has come all this way to see us.’
A horrible thought came to me. ‘Where did the chicken come from?’ I said to Nana. ‘Nana, what is this chicken?’
But I had been shunted down a place by the arrival of my Great-grandmother, and he affected not to hear my shrill demand. ‘Nana,’ I said. ‘Nana.’
‘Quiet, Saadi,’ Bubbly-aunty said, next to me. ‘Don’t scream in people’s ears. It’s a chicken from the garden, as usual.’
‘Which one?’ I said. ‘Which chicken are we eating?’
‘I really don’t know,’ Bubbly said. ‘I really don’t know the difference between one chicken and another. They’d be very happy, I’m sure, if they knew they were going to make such a lovely dinner for all of us. Now, I’m sure you’re not going to be a bad little boy. I’m sure you’re going to be a good little boy, and eat your dinner, aren’t you?’
In my family, we did not leap up and push our chairs over; we did not scream and denounce our relations; we did not punch and pummel the servants, even the ones who had seized our pet chickens and put them in the pot without a second thought. We did not run howling out into the garden in search of our lost chickens. What we did was push the dish away when it came to us, and say, with murder in our voices, ‘No, thank you. I don’t care to eat a friend of mine.’
‘What did he say?’ Great-grandmother said.
‘I didn’t hear,’ Nana said. ‘Pay no attention, and everything will be quite all right.’
9.
I sat in mutinous silence all through dinner. I would not look at or answer my great-grandmother, for whose sake Piklu had been killed and eaten. I promised myself I would never speak to her again, not until she died like the other one, which would be soon. And when dinner was over, I gabbled out the formula asking for permission to get down from the table, and went swiftly out of the front door into the street. It was still light, and my shadow went before me as I walked, shivering and dancing like a puppet, making its own dance, as I tried to walk like a big man down the Dhanmondi street, trying my best to walk like a slave-owner, to walk as a talking car would walk, to walk down my grandfather’s street like Hungry Bear.
Chapter 3
Altaf and Amit
1.
The best place to watch what was happening in the street was from my grandfather’s first-floor balcony. The houses in the street were fronted by high walls, dusted with green lichen, for security. But the balcony on the first floor was high enough to see over. From there, you could see visitors approaching. It might be a family member returning: Nana in his red Vauxhall, driven by Rustum, or my father in a cycle-rickshaw, laden with papers, or some aunts returning from a visit in the neighbourhood. As you negotiated your way between heavy jars of pickles, or slices of mango laid out on kula to dry, you could see if there was a war going on in the street between children of the neighbourhood. Sometimes, when I was very young I would see Sheikh Mujib sweep by in his big official car, with a policeman on a motorbike driving just before. And you knew that he was the prime minister of the country. I never forgot that sight.
Or there might be visitors. Mr Khandekar-nana came sometimes, simply, on foot, with his wife and a son or two. Pultoo-uncle’s friends Kajol and Kanaq would arrive with their folders of art under their arms, sticking out from either side of a cycle-rickshaw. You could hear them arguing from a hundred yards away: they always turned up in a towering passion, appealing to anyone in the house to settle the dispute by taking one side or the other. From Nana’s balcony, through the branches of the tamarind tree, you could see all the way down the street to the left, and all the way down the street to the right. I spent hours up there, in the odour of spice and fruit drying in the open air, in the shade of the tamarind tree.
Some days, a sweet-seller would set up shop opposite Nana’s house. He would make those yellow calligraphic sweets that look like a circular signature in Arabic; I loved to watch. First, he would take a bag of wet dough, then write quickly, a round and a squiggle and a zigzag, directly in the boiling yellow oil, then another one, then another. The sweets would coagulate, then bob to the surface. He would know exactly when to fish them out to drain on newspaper. And then he would start again. It was a little marvel of the street, across the wall at the front of Nana’s house. I could have watched him all day.
I craned out, observing neighbours and guests and street-wallahs and unfamiliar figures; I got to know them from the way they walked, their usual belongings, the way they arrived in a rickshaw or a car or on foot. The most familiar of relatives looked unsure of themselves when surprised from up here, making their way down the public highway in Dhanmondi. Dahlia-aunty, for instance, so confident and cosy when going between Nana’s salon and the kitchen, looked fretful, nervous, and unsure of herself when making her way out of the gate to walk a hundred yards to visit a neighbour. She revealed a different side of herself. Or perhaps that was just the way she looked from Nana’s balcony.
On Saturday morning the cleaner came. You watched him approach from the far end of the street. He did not look at ease, or in the right street; he cringed as he walked even in the empty street, the walk of a man who had been hit too often. He came to do the heavy work that no one in the house would do, to clean the drains and the toilets. He was not Bengali, but Bihari; many of his type had left for Pakistan after 1971, but he was a poor Bihari, and had stayed to clean our drains. If you spoke to him, he answered in Urdu, the Pakistani language, cringing. ‘Chota-sahib’, he called me: little sir. It did not make me like him, though I understood that he wanted to make me his friend by abasing himself in that way. Years later I understood that I actually despised him. It was not a feeling I had had before, and I did not understand it when I was tiny. If you did not speak to him, he sang continuously: he always knew the latest Urdu pop song. As I say, I did not like him. On Saturdays, we got up early, before eight o’clock, because he was coming, and then there was nothing to do but go on to Nana’s balcony and wait for his obsequious walk – he swayed from side to side, ready to bow to anyone.
But there were more welcome visitors, and ones I looked forward to. It was not always obvious why we would impatiently await their turn into the corner of road six, or what they had done to deserve our excitement. When we saw Nadira, after lunch, going to her room to fetch the harmonium, the tabla, and sometimes the sitar, we knew who was coming, and I went up to Nana’s balcony to sit and stare at the corner of the road. Two figures turned the corner. One was very tall and thin, his head bald on top. Under his arm he carried two notebooks, and in the other hand, a black umbrella for when the sun grew too strong in the summer or against the rain in the wet season. The other was very short; he wore plenty of oil on his hair, and it would glint in the light. It was brushed close, immaculately.
These were Nadira’s music teachers. They were not very well paid, and the trousers, long shirt and sandals that the shorter of the two wore were the only clothes I ever saw him in. They were soft and worn, and, if you looked closely, frayed at cuff and hem. All the same, they were both very clean – the short one very strikingly so, his white shirt brilliant in the sunlight from as far away as the corner of the street. I think he washed his shirt every night, pummelling away with soap and water and a stone, hanging it up to dry until the morning. He was the player of tabla. His colleague played the harmonium while Nadira sang. You could not help but think, as they hurried towards Nana’s house, talking quietly and with a professorial air of respect to each other, that they were glad to be coming to teach her. And this was true. They were glad.
I was permitted to sit in on Nadira’s lessons. She was a beautiful singer, and the two instrumentalists took more instruction from her than the other way round. She sang songs by Tagore, and more recent songs about the countryside in Bangladesh, too; they accompanied her on the fluting harmonium, the pattering little song of the tabla and if you looked out of the window, you could see that even the gardener was slowing his work and listening. The tabla player would often ask me to fetch him a glass of water before he began, and as a reward would let me try to play on his small tuned drums, to fetch a melody from them. But I never could, and quickly started to bang on them with my fists. Nadira would never put up with that. ‘You’re making a horrible noise. You can leave, or you can sit on the sofa and listen.’ The harmonium player would never invite me to play on his instrument, with its odd flapping front; balding, tall and serious, he made no effort to befriend small boys. He would never say ‘Chota-sahib’ to a child, and I utterly respected him for it.
They would stay for two hours, accompanying Nadira. They would perform five or six songs. First they would play one through, then return and repeat a section. This was very dull. I would have preferred it if they had just performed their six songs, and then gone away, like a concert. But I understood that they had to practise. My aunt had the loveliest voice I ever heard, and she sang Bengali songs, by Nazrul as well as Tagore. She was quite a different person in these lessons, humble, respectful; she took comments and advice from the two musicians very easily. They seemed more like honoured guests in our house than people who were paid to teach my aunt. I always hoped that they would sing the song about the flower. It was my favourite.
The flower says,
‘Blessed am I,
Blessed am I
On the earth . . .’
The flower says,
‘I was born from the dust,
Kindly, kindly,
Let me forget it,
Let me forget it,
Let me forget.
There is nothing of dust inside me,
There is no dust inside me,’
So says the flower.
They would come to the end of their two hours. Once I had settled, I could listen very happily for all that time, so long as there was more playing than rehearsing, as I thought of it. Nadira would offer them a cup of tea, or a glass of water, and they would accept. If there were other people in the house, at this point they came to greet them. My family knew and respected both of the musicians, from many years back, and so did Khandekar-nana’s family. The tall musician would give an imperceptible sign to the short tabla player. They would get up and go. That was the end of their lesson. The whole family came to the door to say goodbye to them.
2.
In 1965 Altaf Ali was twenty-nine years old, and Amit Mukhopadhyay was twenty-eight. They shared a flat in a block owned by Mrs Khandekar, the wife of my grandfather’s best friend.
They had met in the following way. The radio station in Dacca held concerts of Bengali music every Saturday night. The programme was very popular, and had resisted all attempts so far to remove it from the air. A large roster of Dacca musicians supplied the regular basis of the listeners’ pleasure. It was not always possible for musicians to play, however, in established pairings and groupings. Listeners would find their admired musicians combining in unfamiliar and unprecedented ways. This was one of the appealing things of the programme: the sense, like Bengali street life, that you never knew who you might hear talking together.
Sometimes a sitar player would arrive without his regular partner on tabla. Sometimes a tabla player would say he had no idea what had happened to a harmonium player. Musicians are not the most reliable class of people, and if at worst they could be drunkards and gamblers by inclination, at best they were always open to a better offer from others. When a musician failed to turn up at the recording studio, he had often been offered a well-paid job at the wedding of a rich man’s daughter. The radio programme commanded a large audience. But it could not compete with the fees possible when accompanying a famous singer at a lavish Dacca wedding. The producers understood this. They were always ready to match up instrumentalists and singers who had only a small acquaintance. The musicians were ready, in their turn, not to make difficulties about this, although in practice the performances that were broadcast sometimes came close to catastrophe.
Altaf and Amit met each other in just such a way. Altaf was expecting to see the same tabla player he had been playing with for the previous three years. But the producer came into the musicians’ room – a crowded, cramped room in the old British barracks that the radio station used. (The recording studio next door had its windows muffled with blankets and the door reinforced; still, some noises and voices of the city tended to seep into the programmes that were broadcast.) He hailed Altaf, and looked about the room. ‘This is Amit Mukhopadhyay,’ he said wildly. He was always in a hurry, referring frequently to the big black-bound book in which the logistical details of bookings and commitments were entered. ‘He’ll be playing with you today.’ Then the producer disappeared, without once looking up from the bound volume, or even over the top of his half-moon glasses.
Altaf had not noticed the man. Now he looked at him: he was short but well turned out. His shirt and trousers were very clean, and his hair was neatly brushed, with a tidy parting that drew a white line on his scalp. His face gave the impression of liveliness, without actually engaging to the point of saying anything. Altaf greeted him; the short man greeted him back. They quickly discussed the music. Altaf explained the mode he would be using, and two or three other details about how he liked things to begin, and how to conclude. If the tabla player was good, that would be enough for him. It was all a matter of quick-wittedness, improvisation and response. A bad musician simply played. A good one listened as he played. A very good one would anticipate.
Sometimes a new friend slips into your life unobtrusively, as if you have been walking quietly along when out from a doorway steps a familiar easy presence. He makes a brief remark in greeting, and falls companionably into the rhythm of your stride, so that you hardly remember what it was like to walk alone. So it was with Altaf and Amit. Once they were in the studio, and they started to play the evening song, with Altaf leading, they were attuned to and easy in each other’s musical company. There were none of those false starts and assertive blunders that unfamiliar pairings often made, and practised musicians knew how to conceal. Instead, there was a considerate listening presence. Amit’s playing was, as it were, full of himself: not in a bumptious or assertive way, just as an egg holds meat. It was simply full of a strong flavour, which was Amit’s personality. His playing was free and lucid, complicated, but easy and interesting to follow. There was now a little hesitation, like the lyric breath at the brink of a sneeze, as Amit hung fire before plunging into a decisive monsoon-patter; then there was a rapturous run between tones, without hesitation. All the time Amit’s playing was full of pensive thought and possibility. Altaf felt that those pauses and falterings, like a bird cocking its head and waiting between flourishes of flight, came from Amit’s listening to Altaf’s harmonium. A musician as good as Amit would have been as good with most competent partners. But Altaf could not help taking their broadcast that afternoon as a compliment. And performing to the ear of so good and attentive a partner, Altaf could hear his own musical lines grow more flexible, inward and fantastic. He could not imagine, after ten minutes, how he had ever endured such a thudding banger as Mohammed, his usual partner, which, apparently, he had done week after week until now. After the recording, Amit was flushed and cheerful, although not much more talkative. They found themselves walking in the same direction.
3.
Altaf had five younger brothers still living at home. He had to share a bedroom with the thirteen-year-old and the seven-year-old. He could not remember ever having had a room of his own, although when he was born, for the three years when he was not just the eldest but the only one, he must have lived in such a way. Now, the bedroom had to serve for everything – not just for his brothers’ homework, which they did kneeling on the floor before an old gateleg table intended to support a teacup or two, but his harmonium practice, too. He kept his instrument on a high shelf where his brothers could not get at it. His brothers regarded his harmonium as a toy, and not as the tool of his trade. He practised when they were at school, and put it away out of reach before their return. Every Saturday, he polished the rosewood case with beeswax. He believed it improved the tone.
There was no point in remonstrances with his mother and father. There was no more space in the house to be had. He supposed that he would find a place of his own when he married. But he was poor and did not have the means to marry, and wives expected children, so there would not be any time in which he could live and play in peace. Altaf accepted all of this.
Amit had come to Dacca from Chittagong to play the tabla. He had no other skills. He did not want to do anything else. He did not come from a rich family. (That was how he put it, walking along with Altaf, another recording session over.) But he was making some headway for himself and would progress in life, he believed. He taught, during the week, in a boys’ school, an hour’s bus ride away from where he lived in a quiet way with an old Dacca aunt of his father’s, a widow. There was not enough work to allow him to teach the boys music only; he had to teach them the rudiments of Bengali poetry, too. That was no hardship. The boys were good, intelligent and lively. He sometimes found it hard to keep discipline. Once, an older master who was conducting a class next door had stepped in to ask what the meaning of the unholy bedlam could possibly be.
(Amit, without making any obvious effort, was a good mimic. Altaf laughed at the vividness of the impression, though he did not know the man.)
That had not been pleasant, Amit went on. And naturally, afterwards, the boys had been still harder to keep under control. But it was a good school, and Amit had been lucky to be taken on as a junior master, teaching the boys music and poetry. He taught them to sing Bengali songs, often famous songs by Atulprasad, Tagore and Nazrul, and talked to them about other poets and writers of Bengal. They read the work of these writers together. When the boys were interested and quietened down to listen, they were good students. Amit considered himself very lucky to be able to teach in such a good school, yes he did, and he did not think the daily journey too much. There were neighbours of his aunt who travelled two or three hours every day to go to their place of work. And the other masters were reasonable people.
They stopped at a pavement sandesh-seller; the sweets were all of the same stuff, but shaped in different ways. Some people had their favourite shapes. Altaf did not, but now, talking to Amit, he found himself hovering, unable to decide which shape of sandesh they would settle on and share.
Amit reached the end of his account of his circumstances, and ate a sweet. He had one of those faces which, in movement or in conversation – even when he was working up to saying something – looked open, innocent and trusting. When he sank deep into thought, it looked quite different; it could take on a furrowed, even rather angry appearance. Altaf had known him for almost a year before he realized that the positive way in which he spoke about his circumstances did not reflect an optimistic personality. Instead, Amit spoke well of his bestial pupils and insulting colleagues because he did not trust anyone. He believed that a bad word might get back, and he spoke guardedly, even to Altaf. When he stopped speaking, his face grew dark; he looked on the verge of shouting in rage. And then he ate his sweet with open, boyish enjoyment, and looked quite trusting again.
Altaf was from a Muslim family; Amit was a Hindu. His aunt had a small corner in her flat devoted to some of her gods. Altaf believed that this trait of Amit’s – his inability to trust people, or think that anything was for the best in the end – came ultimately from his family’s religion. He did not say so.
It was hard for Amit to be honest when things had gone wrong in his life. His problems with his flat had been going on for weeks, for instance, before he mentioned them to Altaf. He mentioned them in such a closed and quiet way that Altaf would hardly have realized at first that they were problems at all, if he had not known Amit quite well by then. They were walking along in Old Dacca on their way to meet a possible new singer.
‘I may be moving into a new place,’ Amit remarked out of the blue.
‘Why? I thought you and your aunt were quite settled together.’
‘I thought so too,’ Amit said. ‘But it appears I have been living in a fool’s paradise, all things considered.’
‘In what way?’
‘My aunt has told me that she has had enough of living in Dacca,’ Amit said. ‘I can’t blame her. It is no place for a widow to grow old. Only last month, a rude child called something out to her in the street. It upset her for days. And then there are the Pakistani soldiers. They searched her shopping sack once.’
Altaf believed that sort of thing happened to nearly everyone, and had heard, before, of these two incidents. Amit had mentioned them twice: his aunt, Altaf believed, talked of very little else. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘she has you to look out for her, doesn’t she? You wouldn’t move out unless you had to.’
‘She talks about when I get married, when I leave her alone – then how will she cope?’ Amit said. ‘I have told her many times that I am not in a position to get married, and if I ever do, I will make sure that a younger brother of mine would come from Chittagong to take my place. She is a wonderful woman. I wish you could meet her.’
Altaf had his own views on this matter. ‘But what has changed?’
‘Her son wrote to her from Cox’s Bazar, and suggested that she come and live with him in her declining years,’ Amit said. ‘He has told her about the healthful sea air and his beautiful house, and the peace and quiet. He is a very generous man, I know.’
‘He is worried that she is going to die and leave her money to you,’ Altaf said. ‘That is why he is making this invitation. I have heard about this man before.’
‘Well, she ought to bequeath him her widow’s mite,’ Amit said. ‘That would be the right thing to do. I really don’t blame him, and I can see why she wants to go and live with him. But that is not the problem.’
‘What is the problem?’ Altaf said. ‘Something is worrying you.’
‘It seems very silly,’ Amit said apologetically. ‘But I don’t know where I am going to live.’
‘Why can’t you take over the lease of the flat where you are living? Is it too expensive?’
‘No, not at all,’ Amit said. ‘The landlord is really very reasonable. The rent is a good one, all things considered, and I think I could pay it. Unfortunately, my aunt never really got round to telling him that I was living there and paying rent for the spare room. So he never knew that anyone else was in the flat. How could he, if you think about it? I went to him, and explained the situation to him, and asked if he could consider me as the tenant after my aunt gave notice. I set out how very reasonable it would be for him – he would not have to struggle to find a new tenant, he would not have to ask people, or take anyone on trust. He would have the same tenant he had had for the last three years. I put it to him like that.’
‘And what did he say?’
Amit looked up at the sky; he looked down at the road. A cart loaded with old books, pulled by a bent man crying out, ‘Mind, mind,’ separated the pair of them for a moment. When they came together again, Amit had failed to produce any kind of positive interpretation to put on his landlord’s reply.
‘I am sorry to say he told me to be out of the flat with the rest of my aunt’s rubbish,’ Amit said. ‘Those were his words.’
‘He can’t do that,’ Altaf said.
‘He can do what he likes with his flat,’ Amit said. ‘I don’t know where I am to live. I think I will have to go back to Chittagong.’
‘No, no,’ Altaf said. He looked at Amit. To his surprise, there were tears in his friend’s eyes. No one, after all, likes to be removed from their house at a time not of their choosing. ‘I know exactly who to speak to.’
4.
For eighteen years, Altaf and his family had lived in Dacca, and all his brothers, except two, had been born there. But his family had not always lived in Dacca. His mother and father had married in another part of Bengal, but one which was now part of India. They had made the decision, in 1947, to leave the settlement fifty miles outside Calcutta and go to the new country of Pakistan. They went to the eastern division, where the largest city in the region was Dacca. Not all of their relations had done the same thing. Altaf still had cousins who lived in Calcutta, who had not been killed in the mob violence and rioting. They owned a tailor’s shop around the corner from the American consulate, in a very respectable part of the city, or so Altaf believed.
Altaf had been ten. He remembered bundling under the seat in the train, that one time, clutching his six-year-old brother and holding his mouth shut. His mother and father remained in their seats, holding the baby his mother had not known how to surrender; she made little gulps and gasps as the train juddered to a halt. Who had stopped the train? Everyone knew what happened to the passengers in trains bound for Pakistan, in 1947: the trains were stopped by murderous gangs, and the gangs killed all those inside. That was why his mother had pushed him and his brother underneath the seats. The gang that had stopped this train might murder his mother and father, but they would not think to look under the seats, and Altaf and his brother, alone, could make a new life in Pakistan. She had not known how to surrender the baby she held. Altaf’s blood ran cold to think of the sacrifice she would have made, and at the thought that it would not have worked. The Hindu gangs knew how to look under a train seat.
It had not been a Hindu gang of murderers, but a party of soldiers. They had actually stopped and boarded the train to protect the passengers from gangs further up the line. That terrible journey had finally come to an end, the five of them in a strange city with no possessions but alive. Much later, Altaf had realized that many people had not made the journey in the same way they had. He wondered what had happened to most of the boys he had known at the madrasa and the mosque in the small town outside Calcutta. They had been planning to leave with their families as well, and to make the journey to the new country. Some had arrived; some had stayed. But there were also some who had been killed, as everyone knew, and others whose end had not been discovered.
Altaf’s father had made his way in Dacca: he was a small bookseller for college students. He spoke of himself as a Paragraph-wallah; most of his business was selling volumes of Paragraphs, small essays in the English language that every schoolchild had to write sooner or later. It was a good, steady business, down in Old Dacca, not far from the ferry terminal, a back-street business where no schoolmaster would find his way. When the wind blew in the wrong direction, the stink from the nearby tanneries made the atmosphere for learning in the back-street unendurable. Generations of schoolboys went there, and turned in the same Paragraphs, year after year, with the same mistakes. The family business gave Altaf a respect for Amit’s profession; it also gave him some sense of connection with the sort of people who read and thought.
Among those who had, like Altaf and his family, reached Dacca alive was the son of the most important landowner in the village. He had sacrificed a great deal. He had been a lawyer in Calcutta, whose name was Mr Khandekar. Because of the position his father held in Murshidabad, Altaf’s family were accustomed to approach Mr Khandekar on any question of law or of business. He had always helped them, and always would.
It was interesting and strange to Altaf that Amit did not have such a person in his life. He seemed entirely vulnerable and friendless. The only lawyers he seemed to know, or know of, were the broken-down ones who sat by the courthouse with ancient typewriters balanced on planks on their knees, saying, ‘Affidavit, sir?’ to anyone who passed by. Altaf’s heart went out to him: he decided that he would take charge of Amit’s problem. He was sure that the landlord could not, in fact, evict Amit from the flat he had lived in for three years without any problem, and that Mr Khandekar would bring about a happy conclusion. His only concern was whether Amit, as he said, could really afford the rent of the whole flat. It was possible that Amit would make this claim to Altaf, without it being true, to save face. If the flat were awarded to him, Amit might himself need to take in a lodger.
5.
Mr Khandekar lived in a wealthy part of Dacca, where Amit and Altaf had rarely, if ever, been. They had planned to get there early in the morning, so as not to intrude on Mr Khandekar’s day, and so that it would be more likely that he would be at home. Altaf, in explaining about Mr Khandekar to Amit, had stressed how important and busy he was in his law practice. Perhaps he had overdone it. The night before, Amit had interrupted Altaf’s explanation: ‘Let’s not bother him. I’m sure I will be perfectly all right. There are plenty of places to live. I don’t think I have a leg to stand on.’ But Altaf explained that Mr Khandekar would be very helpful, so long as they arrived at his house early enough and did not interrupt his working day. He was the most important person Altaf knew.
But they were not very familiar with Dhanmondi, where Mr Khandekar lived. They got off the bus on Mirpur Road, which circled the district, and it pulled away. The servants, drivers and other unimportant people who had got off the bus at the same time scattered swiftly in every direction. Altaf had been to Mr Khandekar’s house before, and had thought he would be able to find it easily. But in fact they had got off the bus half a mile too soon, in their nervousness. It took half an hour of doubling backwards and forwards to discover the direction in which the wide, leafy avenues were numbered, and an hour beyond that to find road number twenty. That was the road in which Mr Khandekar’s house lay. In this district, there were few people about, and none to ask for directions. In Altaf’s part of Dacca, a request for help would pull a small crowd, eager to explain that the goal of the journey was beyond the mosque, down the small road behind Suleiman’s hardware store and so on. Here, the only people to ask were scurrying ayahs or servants, late for their tasks, slipping behind high white walls. From time to time a large car murmured down the centre of the road, and behind a shining window, a small face inspected Altaf and Amit, unfamiliar figures in this rich and green-shaded neighbourhood.
It was quite late in the morning when they found Mr Khandekar’s house. The gate was ajar, and they pushed it open nervously. From the white-painted square house, the noise of a discussion was going on and, somewhere deeper in the house, the clamour and clang of cooking pots. They stood under the dense shade of the large mango tree at the entrance. ‘We should go in,’ Amit said. ‘Or knock on the door.’
‘I can’t remember,’ Altaf said. ‘There might be an entrance at the back. For clients.’
But Amit walked forward, quite boldly, and pushed a button to the side of the door. Inside the house, a bell rang – an electric two-note song. The door was opened almost immediately, and behind was Mr Khandekar – Altaf recognized him. He was obviously going out: he was wearing a black suit and a white shirt, and was struggling with a white cambric stock at his throat. His collar was detached, and flying away like the wing of a bird: it was clear that Mr Khandekar was trying to do everything in the wrong order. ‘Salaam,’ he said, fumbling with the stock. ‘Good morning to you.’
‘Sir,’ Altaf said, ‘if this is an inconvenient time—’
‘Please, introduce yourselves,’ Mr Khandekar said. Altaf did so, reminding Mr Khandekar of his family, and of his knowledge of his father’s family, his respect for Mr Khandekar’s father. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘I don’t have the time to see you now. Come in, walk with me.’
They went into the dark wooden hallway of Mr Khandekar’s house and followed him through the salon into a room lined with books. ‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said, as he walked. He had given them each one assessing look, from top to bottom, at the front door. But then he had averted his eyes and talked to them without looking, rummaging about in the drawers of his desk, pulling out a paper from a pile, picking up a clever neat little stud to hold his white collar down and pushing it into a hole, somewhere at the back of his neck. ‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said, picking up a second collar stud and getting to work with it.
Altaf stood in front of this furious activity, and started to explain about his friend, his friend’s aunt, the nephew in Cox’s Bazar, the will and the legacy, the spare room, the terms of the lease—
‘Explain, explain,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘I can’t find the last collar stud. It must be here. Explain, explain.’
Altaf explained about Amit, how his aunt’s landlord had known perfectly well that he was living there but now chose to say that he was flabbergasted to discover it, and that Amit wanted to stay on there, but the landlord’s view was that—
‘There it is,’ Mr Khandekar said, with relief, pouncing on a small silver stud, like a chicken on a seed. ‘Now I can go. Come with me.’
Altaf had feared they were about to be ejected – Mr Khandekar seemed so busy and unconcerned. But he knew that great men were not as you expected. He had expected that they would be asked to wait in an antechamber, rather than following Mr Khandekar about his house as he dressed. Mr Khandekar had his own ways, and he had been listening to them in his own fashion. He had been friendly, manly, and would now be helpful. Altaf had stumbled over the story, but Mr Khandekar had followed its disorganized path and had made sense of it, and now he would present them with a solution. Mr Khandekar led them out of his study. He paused at a looking glass in the salon, and with one hand smoothed down his greying hair; he licked the tips of the forefinger and thumb on his left hand and, in a gesture Altaf half knew, half remembered as being characteristic, wiped them across his eyebrows in a single opening gesture. ‘Come with me,’ he said again. They followed him across the crowded salon, stepping cautiously between little tables and low stools, and through the hallway. Mr Khandekar stopped at a closed door, knocked briefly and pushed it open.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said. ‘Two fellows from the village.’ He turned to Altaf. ‘What did you say your name was? A problem with accommodation. Talk to them. See if you can do anything. I have to be off. I’m fearfully late. How are you, Nadira? Always a pleasure.’
He turned swiftly, in his immaculate black-and-white dress, the white stock now quickly tied and beautifully neat at his throat. There was genuine warmth in the greeting or, Altaf supposed, the farewell to the girl. ‘I always like to see old friends from the village,’ he said. ‘Always, always. Explain everything to my wife – she is the true power in this house. She can do so much more for you than I can, believe me.’ The front door opened anonymously, smoothly, and in front of the house, under the mango tree, a car stood idling. A driver was waiting for Mr Khandekar.
‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ Mr Khandekar said. ‘Always a pleasure.’
6.
Mrs Khandekar was a tiny woman, dressed enchantingly in a pink sari and a single simple necklace. The room she came to the door of was also pink, and lit by the light of the morning sun, coming through the leaves of the tree outside. It was a graceful, charming room, with two Chinese vases on either end of a teak sideboard, the sofa and armchairs upholstered in pale green silk. On the low teak and glass table was a tray with tea things on it, a blue-and-white Chinese set, and a plate of sweet biscuits arranged in a little fan. In the small brown vase on the table, a branch of fruit blossom.
Mrs Khandekar had a guest. She was a girl of perhaps fifteen, who craned her head at the visitors as Mrs Khandekar rose and went to speak to Amit and Altaf at the door. The girl sat very upright, and her hair was arranged in an upwards style. She sat as if aware of the way she would be looked at. Mr Khandekar had called her Nadira.
‘I am so sorry about my husband,’ Mrs Khandekar said, smiling. ‘He is always in such a rush. But perhaps I can help you? You are an old friend of Mr Khandekar’s father, I think?’
Altaf explained. Standing at the door to Mrs Khandekar’s sitting room, he found it came out in a much more orderly way. Amit’s problem seemed to unfold to an easy, elegant, listening audience. Amit stood, listening to Altaf’s explanation with a furrowed brow.
When Altaf had finished, Mrs Khandekar said, ‘I see. It happens to many people, that sort of thing. But do you think your friend’s landlord is at all likely to change his mind? He sounds quite set in his decision.’
‘He doesn’t want me to stay in the flat,’ Amit said, speaking for the first time. ‘I’m sure he has his own good reasons.’
‘I don’t think anyone can force him to rent his flat to someone, once he has made his mind up,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘It is unfortunate, but there it is.’
She looked at them, levelly and not without kindness.
‘I’m sorry to have troubled you in your home,’ Altaf said after a moment, lowering his head.
‘But what would you hope for, at the end of all this?’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘Don’t think about how you would achieve it but what you actually want.’
‘Somewhere to live,’ Altaf said. ‘Merely somewhere to live.’
‘Mrs Khandekar,’ the girl in the pink sitting room said – her voice was low and melodious, and she had an air of adult confidence about her. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Khandekar. What about—’
‘This is Nadira,’ Mrs Khandekar said. ‘The daughter of a very old friend of my husband’s, come to visit and take a cup of tea in the morning. It is so kind of her to drop in like this.’
Altaf and Amit bowed in her direction. ‘And now,’ Mrs Khandekar said, ‘I wonder if the best thing for me to do is not to start telling you about lawyers and law courts and the laws relating to landlords and their tenants, but just to try to help you to find somewhere to live. After all, that is all you want, I believe?’
‘That was just what I was going to say,’ the girl said.
Mrs Khandekar, she said, owned a block of flats in Old Dacca. They had belonged to her father before her, and he had left them to her. They were nice flats – a little old-fashioned, perhaps, but in good order, well looked after and in a very respectable, quiet neighbourhood.
‘What are your professions, gentlemen?’ Mrs Khandekar said.
Altaf let Amit say, ‘Schoolmaster,’ which at least sounded regular and respectable.
Somehow, it seemed to be established in Mrs Khandekar’s mind that the two of them were looking for a flat together, and he found himself saying, ‘I am a musician,’ adding for good measure, ‘I play on the radio,’ and going on to explain the Saturday-evening programme on which he was a regular.
‘How delightful!’ Mrs Khandekar said, with real warmth, clapping her hands together in pleasure. ‘My husband and I never miss it. We must listen out for you.’ She used an English expression.
There were some landlords who would be put off by the idea of musicians, but Mrs Khandekar was not one of them. In fact, once she had discovered that Amit was not just a schoolmaster but also a musician – ‘A famous musician,’ she flatteringly said – it appeared to act as a recommendation and a passport. She asked them into her sitting room, and offered them a seat and a cup of tea. Before long, it had emerged that Nadira, the assured and dignified girl on the sofa, liked to sing and, after a little more conversation, they had agreed to come to her house to teach her, the next free afternoon. In half an hour, everything seemed to have been arranged, and Mrs Khandekar had told them where to meet her the next morning to look at a flat in the block that had become vacant in recent weeks. ‘It is rather small, I am afraid,’ she said apologetically. ‘You must say at once if it does not suit you.’
But of course it would suit them. Altaf thought of his bedroom at home, with the rosewood harmonium placed beyond his brothers’ reach, the noise and the stolen half-hours between hours of chaos. He thought of a door that he could close and a life of his own. Amit’s face showed that, from the beginning, he had considered Altaf a part of his plans for living. Altaf’s heart swelled at the kindness of his friend, and at the degree of understanding between them that went without words.
7.
‘I’ve been to see the hall at the university,’ Altaf said.
It was a year later, and they had been very happily ensconced in Mrs Khandekar’s apartment, just the two of them. It suited them perfectly. It was on the third floor of an old building, and the streets that ran in front of and to the side of it were quiet ones. This was in the furniture-makers’ quarter, and all day long the streets were crowded with bed frames, like brown grazing cows. The smell of wood-shavings perfumed the air; the day was filled with the sounds of honest labour. In the corner of the sitting room, Amit’s mattress was rolled up and tied: he unrolled it every night when Altaf went to the bedroom. The flat was quite dark, with its small windows, but it suited them both and they were happy there. The musical instruments and the copies of music, including ‘Githo Bitan’ by Tagore, were on a shelf in the bedroom. In the sitting room there was a radio they had bought together, which they referred to as ‘our radio’. They had always battened on to the radios of others – an aunt’s, a mother’s – and it was a pleasure to share one instead. There was a portrait of Tagore tacked to the wall of the sitting room, and in each room, a kerosene lamp for when, as now, the electricity failed. Altaf and Amit were sitting by the light of the kerosene lamp on the floor of their small apartment. Mrs Khandekar’s apartment had a table, but they often preferred to sit on the floor to eat. Before them, lay plates of rice, fish and dal, cooked by Amit on the kerosene stove. Altaf and Amit were steadily rolling up the food into balls with the fingers of one hand, and eating them in one gulp. Their dark fingers glistened in the warm light with grains of rice.
‘What hall?’ Amit said, after a pause.
‘It will be for singers, for writers, for scholars like the professor, and for musicians. It can be a place for everyone to meet, and for people to share their knowledge of the Bengali traditions. It will be wonderful, Amit. There are so many people who are interested.’
Amit stopped. ‘They won’t permit it,’ he said. ‘The government.’
‘They won’t have any choice,’ Altaf said.
‘They tried to make everyone write in their script,’ Amit said. ‘They’ll try again. They don’t like us singing our own songs. They’ll respond if Bengalis start gathering to sing their songs and read their poetry and show their paintings.’
‘They needn’t know anything about it,’ Altaf said, with bravado.
‘Oh, yes?’ Amit said, quite mildly. ‘Do you think there’s nobody at the university in the pay of the police? They probably already know about the whole plan.’
‘Well,’ Altaf said, ‘if they already know, we might as well continue with it.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Amit said. ‘We might as well continue.’
This conversation took place just when memories of previous suppressions were fading, and people like Altaf and Amit were making their plans.
Nadira, who was my Nadira-aunty, had been taking music lessons from them for a year, ever since they had met her at Mrs Khandekar’s house. There was even talk of Nadira going on the radio and singing with them, on a Saturday afternoon. They sang classic songs, and read Bengali poetry together, and loaned each other novels in Bengali. There were classics, and new novels: everyone adored Sangshaptak when it came out, and soon Shahidullah Kaiser was a regular presence at the little group. After a few weeks, Nadira had introduced the two musicians to her sisters and even to her smallest brother, the eight-year-old Pultoo; after a few weeks more, her father – my nana – came in and greeted them. There was always a great respect for culture in my family, and from the beginning, Nana and Nani treated Nadira’s music teachers not as servants and lowly tutors, although of course they were paid to come, but as honoured guests.
In time, friends of Nadira asked if Altaf and Amit could come to teach them music, too. There was soon almost more teaching than they could cope with, and they grew to know the numbered streets of Dhanmondi very well, and wondered how they could ever have got so lost that first morning, when they had tried to find their way to Mr Khandekar’s house. There was even talk, at one point, of them being introduced to the household of Sheikh Mujib himself: Sheikh Hasina, his daughter, was said to have enquired about them of a friend. Nothing came of that, though they did see Sheikh Mujib and his daughter occasionally at the sort of gatherings in Dhanmondi where they sometimes played to an audience. They did have half a dozen regular visits to pay, and that was more or less the limit of what they could achieve.
The respectable and quiet streets of Dhanmondi had become fervently enthusiastic about the culture of the Bengalis. Behind the walls of many houses, conversations continued late into the night. Conversations about writers, artists, musicians, poets. Once the gates were shut against the outside world, against neighbours who could not be trusted, against the policemen in the streets and the laws of an alien people, households in Dhanmondi relaxed, and started to talk, and to listen to girls like Nadira-aunty singing a song as Altaf played the harmonium and sang too, and Amit’s palms and fingers pattered like rain on the tabla next to them.
The flower says,
‘Blessed am I,
Blessed am I
On the earth . . .’
Institutions started to open up. A school might decide to hold an exhibition of paintings on Bengali themes by its pupils – Pultoo was, at ten, the star of one of these exhibitions. At parties, the girls of the family might dance to the sitar and the harmonium; in other households, a member of the family might recite their own poetry. In Dhanmondi, on summer afternoons, families went from household to household, taking their music with them. Fifteen years before, the occupying Pakistani forces had tried to suppress the language of Bengal, and to force all in the province to write in an unfamiliar and alien script. (My own parents had demonstrated against this, in 1952, and had been thrown together into police cells; it was a happy and a romantic memory for them.) Now, in the last years of the 1960s, the Pakistani policemen stood around menacingly, and everyone knew who, in the neighbourhood, had been an informer, and probably still was one. Nothing seemed to matter. The Bengalis went from house to house with joyous abandon.
Among them were Altaf and Amit, who were universally welcome, and Nadira and her sisters; there were Nana and Nani and Mr and Mrs Khandekar; there was, too, Sheikh Mujib, whom you could see everywhere, on his way to forging a new country in the fires of his soul. He was the leader of a political party; his daughter was the one who had fretted and raged to my mother about the two missing bags of chilli. He lived under the constant threat of imprisonment, and sometimes he was trailed for days by the police, who sat endlessly in a car outside his house, a hundred yards away from Mr Khandekar. Sheikh Mujib came to these parties when he could; he said it made him glad to hear the songs of the Bengali. He made no particular fuss when he entered a room as a guest; still, he was who he was, and the room was drawn towards his big glossy hair, his plump, humorous look. The room stood up at his entrance: he would force a friend, perhaps a distinguished poet, to sit down again, before him. A special place was made for him, and perhaps for his daughter, Hasina, too. He would accept the special place while, all the time, protesting mildly with his hands. You never knew who you would meet at one of these parties. The gates stood open, and almost everyone was welcome.
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